Multi-step time series forecasting of electric load using machine learning models

Abstract

Multi-step forecasting is very challenging and there are a lack of studies available that consist of machine learning algorithms and methodologies for multi-step forecasting. It has also been found that lack of collaborations between these different fields is creating a barrier to further developments. In this paper, multi-step time series forecasting are performed on three nonlinear electric load datasets extracted from Open-Power-System-Data.org using two machine learning models. Multi-step forecasting performance of Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) based Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) models are compared. Comparative analysis of forecasting performance of the two models reveals that the LSTM model has superior performance in comparison to the ARIMA model for multi-step electric load forecasting.