Electricity demand forecasting in industrial and residential facilities using ensemble machine learning

This article presents electricity demand forecasting models for industrial and residential facilities, developed using ensemble machine learning strategies. Short term electricity demand forecasting is beneficial for both consumers and suppliers, as it allows improving energy efficiency policies and the rational use of resources. Computational intelligence models are developed for day-ahead electricity demand forecasting. An ensemble strategy is applied to build the day-ahead forecasting model based on several one-hour models. Three steps of data preprocessing are carried out, including treating missing values, removing outliers, and standardization. Feature extraction is performed to reduce overfitting, reducing the training time and improving the accuracy. The best model is optimized using grid search strategies on hyperparameter space. Then, an ensemble of 24 instances is generated to build the complete day-ahead forecasting model. Considering the computational complexity of the applied techniques, they are developed and evaluated on the National Supercomputing Center (Cluster-UY), Uruguay. Three different real data sets are used for evaluation: an industrial park in Burgos (Spain), the total electricity demand for Uruguay, and demand from a distribution substation in Montevideo (Uruguay). Standard performance metrics are applied to evaluate the proposed models. The main results indicate that the best day ahead model based on ExtraTreesRegressor has a mean absolute percentage error of 2:55% on industrial data, 5:17% on total consumption data and 9:09% on substation data.