Experimental investigation of variational mode decomposition and deep learning for short-term multi-horizon residential electric load forecasting

With the booming growth of advanced digital technologies, it has become possible for users as well as distributors of energy to obtain detailed and timely information about the electricity consumption of households. These technologies can also be used to forecast the household's electricity consumption (a.k.a. the load). In this paper, Variational Mode Decomposition and deep learning techniques are investigated as a way to improve the accuracy of the load forecasting problem. Although this problem has been studied in the literature, selecting an appropriate decomposition level and a deep learning technique providing better forecasting performance have garnered comparatively less attention. This study bridges this gap by studying the effect of six decomposition levels and five distinct deep learning networks. The raw load profiles are first decomposed into intrinsic mode functions using the Variational Mode Decomposition in order to mitigate their non-stationary aspect. Then, day, hour, and past electricity consumption data are fed as a three-dimensional input sequence to a four-level Wavelet Decomposition Network model. Finally, the forecast sequences related to the different intrinsic mode functions are combined to form the aggregate forecast sequence. The proposed method was assessed using load profiles of five Moroccan households from the Moroccan buildings' electricity consumption dataset (MORED) and was benchmarked against state-of-the-art time-series models and a baseline persistence model.