TriForecaster: A Mixture of Experts Framework for Multi-Region Electric Load Forecasting with Tri-dimensional Specialization

TL;DR

TriForecaster is a novel multi-expert framework that improves multi-region electric load forecasting by dynamically specializing models across regional, contextual, and temporal dimensions, significantly reducing forecast errors.

Contribution

It introduces a Mixture of Experts approach with specialized layers for multi-region load forecasting, addressing regional, contextual, and temporal variations in a unified framework.

Findings

Achieves 22.4% average forecast error reduction

Outperforms state-of-the-art models on four datasets

Demonstrates practical utility on eForecaster platform

Abstract

Electric load forecasting is pivotal for power system operation, planning and decision-making. The rise of smart grids and meters has provided more detailed and high-quality load data at multiple levels of granularity, from home to bus and cities. Motivated by similar patterns of loads across different cities in a province in eastern China, in this paper we focus on the Multi-Region Electric Load Forecasting (MRELF) problem, targeting accurate short-term load forecasting for multiple sub-regions within a large region. We identify three challenges for MRELF, including regional variation, contextual variation, and temporal variation. To address them, we propose TriForecaster, a new framework leveraging the Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach within a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) paradigm to overcome these challenges. TriForecaster features RegionMixer and Context-Time Specializer (CTSpecializer) layers, enabling dynamic cooperation and specialization of expert models across regional, contextual, and temporal dimensions. Based on evaluation on four real-world MRELF datasets with varied granularity, TriForecaster outperforms state-of-the-art models by achieving an average forecast error reduction of 22.4\%, thereby demonstrating its flexibility and broad applicability. In particular, the deployment of TriForecaster on the eForecaster platform in eastern China exemplifies its practical utility, effectively providing city-level, short-term load forecasts for 17 cities, supporting a population exceeding 110 million and daily electricity usage over 100 gigawatt-hours.