Short-term load forecasting using an attended sequential encoder-stacked decoder model with online training

Abstract

The paper presents a new approach for the prediction of load active power 24 h ahead using an attended sequential encoder and stacked decoder model with Long Short-Term Memory cells. The load data are owned by the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) and is dated from the years 2014–2017. Due to dynamics in the load patterns, multiple short pieces of training on pre-filtered data are executed in combination with the transfer learning concept. The evaluation is done by direct comparison with the results of the NYISO forecast and additionally under consideration of several benchmark methods. The results in terms of the Mean Absolute Percentage Error range from 1.5% for the highly loaded New York City zone to 3% for the Mohawk Valley zone with rather small load consumption. The execution time of a day ahead forecast including the training on a personal computer without GPU accounts to 10 s on average.