StreamCast: Fast and online mining of power grid time sequences

Abstract

How can we efficiently forecast the power consumption of a location for the next few days? More challengingly, how can we forecast the power consumption if the temperature increases by 10°C, the number of appliances in the grid increase by 20%, and voltage levels increase by 5%? Such 'what-if scenarios' are crucial for future planning, to ensure that the grid remains reliable even under extreme conditions. Our contributions are as follows: 1) Domain knowledge infusion: we propose a novel Temporal BIG model that extends the physics-based BIG model, allowing it to capture changes over time, trends, and seasonality, and temperature effects. 2) Forecasting: our StreamCast algorithm forecasts multiple steps ahead and outperforms baselines in accuracy. Our algorithm is online, requiring constant update time per new data point and bounded memory. 3) What-if scenarios and anomaly detection: our approach can handle scenarios in which the voltage levels, temperature, or number of appliances change. It also spots anomalies in real data, and provides confidence intervals for its forecasts, to assist in planning for various scenarios. Experimental results show that StreamCast has 27% lower forecasting error than baselines on real data, scales linearly, and runs in 4 minutes on a time sequence of 40 million points.