Short-term residential load forecasting using Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks

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The abundance of energy consumption data collected by smart meters has inspired researchers to employ deep neural networks to solve the existing problems in the power industry, such as Short-Term Load Forecasting (STLF). Most studies addressing the STLF problem, focus on historical load data and to achieve higher performance, they supplement costly accessible environmental and calendar variables with data. This approach ignores the existing spatial information among the consumers which subsequently might lead into the emergence of similar consumption patterns. In this paper, we present a Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network, a novel neural architecture, for STLF problem that combines Graph Convolutional Networks and Long Short-Term Memory networks to simultaneously extract spatial and temporal information from users with similar consumption patterns. Our model captures spatial information from users without prior knowledge of their geographic location and does not rely on additional environmental variables. We compared our model to traditional baseline models for STLF using two real-world electricity consumption datasets. The empirical results demonstrate a significant improvement in prediction compared with the baseline models, exhibiting a 9.5% and an 8% improvement in terms of Mean Absolute Percentage Error, in the Customer Behavior Trials and Low Carbon London datasets, respectively.