Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification with Anchored Ensembles for Robust EV Power Consumption Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces an anchored-ensemble LSTM with a Student-t likelihood for accurate and trustworthy uncertainty quantification in EV power consumption prediction, combining robustness, calibration, and efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel anchored-ensemble approach with a Student-t likelihood that captures both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty without test-time sampling.

Findings

Achieves strong prediction accuracy with RMSE 3.36 and R-squared 0.93.

Provides well-calibrated uncertainty intervals with near-nominal coverage.

Outperforms or matches baseline methods in log-score and interval sharpness.

Abstract

Accurate EV power estimation underpins range prediction and energy management, yet practitioners need both point accuracy and trustworthy uncertainty. We propose an anchored-ensemble Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with a Student-t likelihood that jointly captures epistemic (model) and aleatoric (data) uncertainty. Anchoring imposes a Gaussian weight prior (MAP training), yielding posterior-like diversity without test-time sampling, while the t-head provides heavy-tailed robustness and closed-form prediction intervals. Using vehicle-kinematic time series (e.g., speed, motor RPM), our model attains strong accuracy: RMSE 3.36 +/- 1.10, MAE 2.21 +/- 0.89, R-squared = 0.93 +/- 0.02, explained variance 0.93 +/- 0.02, and delivers well-calibrated uncertainty bands with near-nominal coverage. Against competitive baselines (Student-t MC dropout; quantile regression with/without anchoring), our method matches or improves log-scores while producing sharper intervals at the same coverage. Crucially for real-time deployment, inference is a single deterministic pass per ensemble member (or a weight-averaged collapse), eliminating Monte Carlo latency. The result is a compact, theoretically grounded estimator that couples accuracy, calibration, and systems efficiency, enabling reliable range estimation and decision-making for production EV energy management.