Short-Term Electric Load Forecasting Using Echo State Networks and PCA Decomposition

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In this paper, we approach the problem of forecasting a time series (TS) of an electrical load measured on the Azienda Comunale Energia e Ambiente (ACEA) power grid, the company managing the electricity distribution in Rome, Italy, with an echo state network (ESN) considering two different leading times of 10 min and 1 day. We use a standard approach for predicting the load in the next 10 min, while, for a forecast horizon of one day, we represent the data with a high-dimensional multi-variate TS, where the number of variables is equivalent to the quantity of measurements registered in a day. Through the orthogonal transformation returned by PCA decomposition, we reduce the dimensionality of the TS to a lower number $k$ of distinct variables; this allows us to cast the original prediction problem in $k$ different one-step ahead predictions. The overall forecast can be effectively managed by $k$ distinct prediction models, whose outputs are combined together to obtain the final result. We employ a genetic algorithm for tuning the parameters of the ESN and compare its prediction accuracy with a standard autoregressive integrated moving average model.