Hierarchical Electricity Time Series Forecasting for Integrating Consumption Patterns Analysis and Aggregation Consistency

Electricity demand forecasting is a very important problem for energy supply and environmental protection. It can be formalized as a hierarchical time series forecasting problem with the aggregation constraints according to the geographical hierarchy, since the sum of the prediction results of the disaggregated time series should be equal to the prediction results of the aggregated ones. However in most previous work, the aggregation consistency is ensured at the loss of forecast accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering-based hierarchical electricity time series forecasting approach. Instead of dealing with the geographical hierarchy directly, we explore electricity consumption patterns by clustering analysis and build a new consumption pattern based time series hierarchy. We then present a novel hierarchical forecasting method with consumption hierarchical aggregation constraints to improve the electricity demand predictions of the bottom level, followed by a ``bottom-up" method to obtain forecasts of the geographical higher levels. Especially, we observe that in our consumption pattern based hierarchy the reconciliation error of the bottom level time series is ``correlated" to its membership degree of the corresponding cluster (consumption pattern), and hence apply this correlations as the regularization term in our forecasting objective function. Extensive experiments on real-life datasets verify that our approach achieves the best prediction accuracy, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.