Demand forecasting is crucial for the operation and planning of the energy and power industry. Accurate demand forecasting can assist decision-makers in reducing operational or planning costs while optimizing supply chains and resource utilization. Due to various uncertainties and dynamically changing environments, traditional offline deterministic forecasting methods may face difficulty in forecasting demands accurately and be unable to effectively quantify the uncertainties in forecasts. To adapt to dynamic environmental changes, several online learning methods have been proposed, which require large computational resources. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a Transformer-based probabilistic demand forecasting with an adaptive online learning algorithm. More specifically, we design a probabilistic decoder for the Transformer to quantify forecast uncertainty. Furthermore, an adaptive online learning algorithm is employed to selectively update parameters based on an adaptive update strategy, reducing computational burden while allowing for timely adaptation to dynamic environmental changes. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets and real electricity demand data from fused magnesium furnace (FMF). The results show that the proposed method exhibits superior accuracy in both deterministic and probabilistic forecasting scenarios. Finally, through ablation experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive online probabilistic forecasting algorithm is validated.
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