A residential load forecasting method for multi-attribute adversarial learning considering multi-source uncertainties

Abstract

The rapid development of the Internet of Things and device-level meters provides accurate energy consumption data for various household devices, and making full use of these data to achieve higher accuracy of residential load forecasting is an open problem. Moreover, the uncertainties and insufficient feature extraction of variables make it challenging for individual residential load forecasts. In this regard, this paper proposes a novel short-term residential load forecasting method. It has the following aspects: (1) Considering the multi-source uncertainties, a multi-source uncertainties divide-and-conquer mechanism is proposed, which classifies the residential load from the device level according to different sources of uncertainties and forecasts separately. (2) Considering the multiple attributes of influencing variables, a multi-attribute adversarial learning mechanism based on the conditional Wasserstein generative adversarial network with gradient penalty (cWGAN-GP) is designed. In cWGAN-GP, this paper uses a long short-term memory network to implement the generator and uses a convolutional neural network to implement the discriminator. The former is used to extract temporal features, while the latter is used to extract spatial features, and they realize the fusion of multiple attributes through adversarial training to improve prediction accuracy. Compared with existing load forecasting methods, our proposed method’s mean absolute percentage error decreased by 1.5–38.9%, mean square error decreased by 3.5–35.9%, normalized root MSE decreased by 1.7–19.9%, and mean absolute error decreased by 3.7–27.0%.