TrustEnergy: A Unified Framework for Accurate and Reliable User-level Energy Usage Prediction

TL;DR

TrustEnergy is a comprehensive framework that enhances user-level energy consumption prediction accuracy and reliability by capturing spatial-temporal patterns and quantifying uncertainty dynamically.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hierarchical spatiotemporal graph neural network and a sequential conformalized quantile regression for reliable, fine-grained energy prediction.

Findings

Achieves 5.4% higher prediction accuracy over baselines.

Improves uncertainty quantification by 5.7%.

Effectively models both macro and micro energy usage patterns.

Abstract

Energy usage prediction is important for various real-world applications, including grid management, infrastructure planning, and disaster response. Although a plethora of deep learning approaches have been proposed to perform this task, most of them either overlook the essential spatial correlations across households or fail to scale to individualized prediction, making them less effective for accurate fine-grained user-level prediction. In addition, due to the dynamic and uncertain nature of energy usage caused by various factors such as extreme weather events, quantifying uncertainty for reliable prediction is also significant, but it has not been fully explored in existing work. In this paper, we propose a unified framework called TrustEnergy for accurate and reliable user-level energy usage prediction. There are two key technical components in TrustEnergy, (i) a Hierarchical Spatiotemporal Representation module to efficiently capture both macro and micro energy usage patterns with a novel memory-augmented spatiotemporal graph neural network, and (ii) an innovative Sequential Conformalized Quantile Regression module to dynamically adjust uncertainty bounds to ensure valid prediction intervals over time, without making strong assumptions about the underlying data distribution. We implement and evaluate our TrustEnergy framework by working with an electricity provider in Florida, and the results show our TrustEnergy can achieve a 5.4% increase in prediction accuracy and 5.7% improvement in uncertainty quantification compared to state-of-the-art baselines.