IoT-Based Energy Consumption Prediction Using Transformers

Abstract

With the advancement of various IoT-based systems, the amount of data is steadily increasing. The increase of data on a daily basis is essential for decision-makers to assess current situations and formulate future policies. Among the various types of data, time-series data presents a challenging relationship between current and future dependencies. Time-series prediction aims to forecast future values of target variables by leveraging insights gained from past data points. Recent advancements in deep learning-based algorithms have surpassed traditional machine learning-based algorithms for time-series in IoT systems. In this study, we employ Enc&Dec Transformer, the latest advancements in neural networks for time-series prediction problems. The obtained results were compared with Encoder-only and Decoder-only Transformer blocks as well as well-known recurrent based algorithms, including 1D-CNN, RNN, LSTM, and GRU. To validate our approach, we utilize three different univariate time-series datasets collected on an hourly basis, focusing on energy consumption within IoT systems. Our results demonstrate that our proposed Transformer model outperforms its counterparts, achieving a minimum Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.020 on small, 0.008 on medium, and 0.006 on large-sized datasets.