Household Electricity Load Forecasting Based on Multitask Convolutional Neural Network with Profile Encoding

Household load forecasting provides great challenges as a result of high uncertainty in individual consumption of load profile. Traditional models based on machine learning tried to explore uncertainty depending on clustering, spectral analysis, and sparse coding with hand craft features. Recently, deep learning skills like recurrent neural network attempt to learn the uncertainty with one-hot encoding which is too simple and not efficient. In this paper, for the first time, we proposed a multitask deep convolutional neural network for household load forecasting. The baseline of one branch is built on multiscale dilated convolutions for load forecasting. The other branch based on deep convolutional autoencoder is responsible for household profile encoding. In addition, an efficient encoding strategy for household profile is designed that serves a novel feature fusion mechanism integrated into forecasting branch. Our proposed network serves an end-to-end manner in training and inference process. Sufficient ablation studies were conducted to demonstrate effectiveness of innovations and great generalization in point and probabilistic load forecasting at household level, which provides a promising prospect in demand response.