Deep neural network for load forecasting centred on architecture evolution

Nowadays, electricity demand forecasting is critical for electric utility companies. Accurate residential load forecasting plays an essential role as an individual component for integrated areas such as neighborhood load consumption. Short-term load forecasting can help electric utility companies reduce waste because electric power is expensive to store. This paper proposes a novel method to evolve deep neural networks for time series forecasting applied to residential load forecasting. The approach centres its efforts on the neural network architecture during the evolution. Then, the model weights are adjusted using an evolutionary optimization technique to tune the model performance automatically. Experimental results on a large dataset containing hourly load consumption of a residence in London, Ontario shows that the performance of unadjusted weights architecture is comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, when the architecture weights are adjusted the model accuracy surpassed the state-of-the-art method called LSTM one shot by 3.0%

Transfer Learning by Similarity Centred Architecture Evolution for Multiple Residential Load Forecasting

The development from traditional low voltage grids to smart systems has become extensive and adopted worldwide. Expanding the demand response program to cover the residential sector raises a wide range of challenges. Short term load forecasting for residential consumers in a neighbourhood could lead to a better understanding of low voltage consumption behaviour. Nevertheless, users with similar characteristics can present diversity in consumption patterns. Consequently, transfer learning methods have become a useful tool to tackle differences among residential time series. This paper proposes a method combining evolutionary algorithms for neural architecture search with transfer learning to perform short term load forecasting in a neighbourhood with multiple household load consumption. The approach centres its efforts on neural architecture search using evolutionary algorithms. The neural architecture evolution process retains the patterns of the centre-most house, and later the architecture weights are adjusted for each house in a multihouse set from a neighbourhood. In addition, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to ensure model performance. Experimental results on a large dataset containing hourly load consumption for ten houses in London, Ontario showed that the performance of the proposed approach performs better than the compared techniques. Moreover, the proposed method presents the average accuracy performance of 3.17 points higher than the state-of-the-art LSTM one shot method

Regional And Residential Short Term Electric Demand Forecast Using Deep Learning

For optimal power system operations, electric generation must follow load demand. The generation, transmission, and distribution utilities require load forecasting for planning and operating grid infrastructure efficiently, securely, and economically. This thesis work focuses on short-term load forecast (STLF), that concentrates on the time-interval from few hours to few days. An inaccurate short-term load forecast can result in higher cost of generating and delivering power. Hence, accurate short-term load forecasting is essential. Traditionally, short-term load forecasting of electrical demand is typically performed using linear regression, autoregressive integrated moving average models (ARIMA), and artificial neural networks (ANN). These conventional methods are limited in application for big datasets, and often their accuracy is a matter of concern. Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for machine-learning problems, and known for real-time data processing, parallel computations, and ability to work with a large dataset with higher accuracy. DNNs have been shown to greatly outperform traditional methods in many disciplines, and they have revolutionized data analytics. Aspired from such a success of DNNs in machine learning problems, this thesis investigated the DNNs potential in electrical load forecasting application. Different DNN Types such as multilayer perception model (MLP) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) such as long short-term memory (LSTM), Gated recurrent Unit (GRU) and simple RNNs for different datasets were evaluated for accuracies. This thesis utilized the following data sets: 1) Iberian electric market dataset; 2) NREL residential home dataset; 3) AMPds smart-meter dataset; 4) UMass Smart Home datasets with varying time intervals or data duration for the validating the applicability of DNNs for short-term load forecasting. The Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) evaluation indicates DNNs outperform conventional method for multiple datasets. In addition, a DNN based smart scheduling of appliances was also studied. This work evaluates MAPE accuracies of clustering-based forecast over non-clustered forecasts

Application of Artificial Neural Networks for Power Load Prediction in Critical Infrastructure: A Comparative Case Study

This article aims to assess the effectiveness of state-of-the-art artificial neural network (ANN) models in time series analysis, specifically focusing on their application in prediction tasks of critical infrastructures (CIs). To accomplish this, shallow models with nearly identical numbers of trainable parameters are constructed and examined. The dataset, which includes 120,884 hourly electricity consumption records, is divided into three subsets (25%, 50%, and the entire dataset) to examine the effect of increasing training data. Additionally, the same models are trained and evaluated for univariable and multivariable data to evaluate the impact of including more features. The case study specifically focuses on predicting electricity consumption using load information from Norway. The results of this study confirm that LSTM models emerge as the best-performed model, surpassing other models as data volume and feature increase. Notably, for training datasets ranging from 2000 to 22,000 instances, GRU exhibits superior accuracy, while in the 22,000 to 42,000 range, LSTM and BiLSTM are the best. When the training dataset is within 42,000 to 360,000, LSTM and ConvLSTM prove to be good choices in terms of accuracy. Convolutional-based models exhibit superior performance in terms of computational efficiency. The convolutional 1D univariable model emerges as a standout choice for scenarios where training time is critical, sacrificing only 0.000105 in accuracy while a threefold improvement in training time is gained. For training datasets lower than 22,000, feature inclusion does not enhance any of the ANN model’s performance. In datasets exceeding 22,000 instances, ANN models display no consistent pattern regarding feature inclusion, though LSTM, Conv1D, Conv2D, ConvLSTM, and FCN tend to benefit. BiLSTM, GRU, and Transformer do not benefit from feature inclusion, regardless of the training dataset size. Moreover, Transformers exhibit inefficiency in time series forecasting due to their permutation-invariant self-attention mechanism, neglecting the crucial role of sequence order, as evidenced by their poor performance across all three datasets in this study. These results provide valuable insights into the capabilities of ANN models and their effective usage in the context of CI prediction tasks.publishedVersio

Machine Learning Tools in the Predictive Analysis of ERCOT Load Demand Data

The electric load industry has seen a significant transformation over the last few decades, culminating in the establishment and implementation of electricity markets. This transition separates electric generation services into a distinct, more competitive sector of the industry, allowing for the introduction of greater unpredictability into the system. Forecasting power system load has developed into a core research area in power and energy demand engineering in order to maintain a constant balance between electricity supply and demand. The purpose of this thesis dissertation is to reduce power system uncertainty by improving forecasting accuracy through the use of sophisticated machine learning techniques. Additionally, this research provides sophisticated machine learning-based forecasting methodologies for the three forecasting professions from a variety of perspectives, incorporating several advanced deep learning features such as Naïve/default, Hyperparameter Tuning, and Custom Early Stopping. We begin by creating long-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) models for ERCOT demand data, and then compare them to some of the most well-known supervised machine learning models, such as ARIMA and SARIMA, to identify the best set of models for long- and short-term load forecasting. We will also use multiple comparison approaches, such as the radar chart and the Pygal radar chart, to perform a thorough evaluation of each of the deep learning models before settling on the best model

A Distributed and Real-time Machine Learning Framework for Smart Meter Big Data

The advanced metering infrastructure allows smart meters to collect high-resolution consumption data, thereby enabling consumers and utilities to understand their energy usage at different levels, which has led to numerous smart grid applications. Smart meter data, however, poses different challenges to developing machine learning frameworks than classic theoretical frameworks due to their big data features and privacy limitations. Therefore, in this work, we aim to address the challenges of building machine learning frameworks for smart meter big data. Specifically, our work includes three parts: 1) We first analyze and compare different learning algorithms for multi-level smart meter big data. A daily activity pattern recognition model has been developed based on non-intrusive load monitoring for appliance-level smart meter data. Then, a consensus-based load profiling and forecasting system has been proposed for individual building level and higher aggregated level smart meter data analysis; 2) Following discussion of multi-level smart meter data analysis from an offline perspective, a universal online functional analysis model has been proposed for multi-level real-time smart meter big data analysis. The proposed model consists of a multi-scale load dynamic profiling unit based on functional clustering and a multi-scale online load forecasting unit based on functional deep neural networks. The two units enable online tracking of the dynamic cluster trajectories and online forecasting of daily multi-scale demand; 3) To enable smart meter data analysis in the distributed environment, FederatedNILM was proposed, which is then combined with differential privacy to provide privacy guarantees for the appliance-level distributed machine learning framework. Based on federated deep learning enhanced with two schemes, namely the utility optimization scheme and the privacy-preserving scheme, the proposed distributed and privacy-preserving machine learning framework enables electric utilities and service providers to offer smart meter services on a large scale