From Dense to Sparse: Event Response for Enhanced Residential Load Forecasting

TL;DR

This paper introduces ERKG, a novel approach that incorporates appliance event detection to improve residential load forecasting by capturing regular usage patterns often overlooked by traditional dense data methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new event-response knowledge guided method that extracts appliance operational states and integrates them into load forecasting models, enhancing prediction accuracy.

Findings

ERKG reduces MAE by over 8% on tested models.

Event-related sparse knowledge improves load forecasting accuracy.

ERKG can be integrated into existing models as a plug-in module.

Abstract

Residential load forecasting (RLF) is crucial for resource scheduling in power systems. Most existing methods utilize all given load records (dense data) to indiscriminately extract the dependencies between historical and future time series. However, there exist important regular patterns residing in the event-related associations among different appliances (sparse knowledge), which have yet been ignored. In this paper, we propose an Event-Response Knowledge Guided approach (ERKG) for RLF by incorporating the estimation of electricity usage events for different appliances, mining event-related sparse knowledge from the load series. With ERKG, the event-response estimation enables portraying the electricity consumption behaviors of residents, revealing regular variations in appliance operational states. To be specific, ERKG consists of knowledge extraction and guidance: i) a forecasting model is designed for the electricity usage events by estimating appliance operational states, aiming to extract the event-related sparse knowledge; ii) a novel knowledge-guided mechanism is established by fusing such state estimates of the appliance events into the RLF model, which can give particular focuses on the patterns of users' electricity consumption behaviors. Notably, ERKG can flexibly serve as a plug-in module to boost the capability of existing forecasting models by leveraging event response. In numerical experiments, extensive comparisons and ablation studies have verified the effectiveness of our ERKG, e.g., over 8% MAE can be reduced on the tested state-of-the-art forecasting models.