Interpretable Load Forecasting via Representation Learning of Geo-distributed Meteorological Factors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a representation learning framework for geo-distributed meteorological factors to improve day-ahead load forecasting accuracy, revealing spatial relationships and importance of factors across regions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel graph-based representation learning method that considers spatial relationships among meteorological factors and employs Shapley values for interpretability in load forecasting.

Findings

Improved forecasting accuracy in extreme weather scenarios

Identified correlations between meteorological factor importance and regional economic indicators

Enhanced interpretability of meteorological influences on load forecasting

Abstract

Meteorological factors (MF) are crucial in day-ahead load forecasting as they significantly influence the electricity consumption behaviors of consumers. Numerous studies have incorporated MF into the load forecasting model to achieve higher accuracy. Selecting MF from one representative location or the averaged MF as the inputs of the forecasting model is a common practice. However, the difference in MF collected in various locations within a region may be significant, which poses a challenge in selecting the appropriate MF from numerous locations. A representation learning framework is proposed to extract geo-distributed MF while considering their spatial relationships. In addition, this paper employs the Shapley value in the graph-based model to reveal connections between MF collected in different locations and loads. To reduce the computational complexity of calculating the Shapley value, an acceleration method is adopted based on Monte Carlo sampling and weighted linear regression. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method improves the day-ahead forecasting accuracy, especially in extreme scenarios such as the "accumulation temperature effect" in summer and "sudden temperature change" in winter. We also find a significant correlation between the importance of MF in different locations and the corresponding area's GDP and mainstay industry.