Short-term load forecasting for a single household based on convolution neural networks using data augmentation

Abstract

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is spreading to households in some countries, and could be a source for forecasting the residential electric demand. However, load forecasting of a single household is still a fairly challenging topic because of the high volatility and uncertainty of the electric demand of households. Moreover, there is a limitation in the use of historical load data because of a change in house ownership, change in lifestyle, integration of new electric devices, and so on. The paper proposes a novel method to forecast the electricity loads of single residential households. The proposed forecasting method is based on convolution neural networks (CNNs) combined with a data-augmentation technique, which can artificially enlarge the training data. This method can address issues caused by a lack of historical data and improve the accuracy of residential load forecasting. Simulation results illustrate the validation and efficacy of the proposed method.