Multi-Step Ahead Forecasting of the Energy Consumed by the Residential and Commercial Sectors in the United States Based on a Hybrid CNN-BiLSTM Model

COVID-19 has continuously influenced energy security and caused an enormous impact on human life and social activities due to the stay-at-home orders. After the Omicron wave, the economy and the energy system are gradually recovering, but uncertainty remains due to the virus mutations that could arise. Accurate forecasting of the energy consumed by the residential and commercial sectors is challenging for efficient emergency management and policy-making. Affected by geographical location and long-term evolution, the time series of the energy consumed by the residential and commercial sectors has prominent temporal and spatial characteristics. A hybrid model (CNN-BiLSTM) based on a convolution neural network (CNN) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) is proposed to extract the time series features, where the spatial features of the time series are captured by the CNN layer, and the temporal features are extracted by the BiLSTM layer. Then, the recursive multi-step ahead forecasting strategy is designed for multi-step ahead forecasting, and the grid search is employed to tune the model hyperparameters. Four cases of 24-step ahead forecasting of the energy consumed by the residential and commercial sectors in the United States are given to evaluate the performance of the proposed model, in comparison with 4 deep learning models and 6 popular machine learning models based on 12 evaluation metrics. Results show that CNN-BiLSTM outperforms all other models in four cases, with MAPEs ranging from 4.0034% to 5.4774%, improved from 0.1252% to 49.1410%, compared with other models, which is also about 5 times lower than that of the CNN and 5.9559% lower than the BiLSTM on average. It is evident that the proposed CNN-BiLSTM has improved the prediction accuracy of the CNN and BiLSTM and has great potential in forecasting the energy consumed by the residential and commercial sectors.