DiffLoad: Uncertainty Quantification in Load Forecasting with Diffusion Model

Abstract

Electrical load forecasting is of great significance for the decision makings in power systems, such as unit commitment and energy management. In recent years, various self-supervised neural network-based methods have been applied to electrical load forecasting to improve forecasting accuracy and capture uncertainties. However, most current methods are based on Gaussian likelihood methods, which aim to accurately estimate the distribution expectation under a given covariate. This kind of approach is difficult to adapt to situations where temporal data has a distribution shift and outliers. In this paper, we propose a diffusion-based Seq2seq structure to estimate epistemic uncertainty and use the robust additive Cauchy distribution to estimate aleatoric uncertainty. Rather than accurately forecasting conditional expectations, we demonstrate our method's ability in separating two types of uncertainties and dealing with the mutant scenarios