A Hybrid Neural Network Model for Power Demand Forecasting

The problem of power demand forecasting for the effective planning and operation of smart grid, renewable energy and electricity market bidding systems is an open challenge. Numerous research efforts have been proposed for improving prediction performance in practical environments through statistical and artificial neural network approaches. Despite these efforts, power demand forecasting problems remain to be a grand challenge since existing methods are not sufficiently practical to be widely deployed due to their limited accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a hybrid power demand forecasting model, called (c, l)-Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) + Convolution Neural Network (CNN). We consider the power demand as a key value, while we incorporate c different types of contextual information such as temperature, humidity and season as context values in order to preprocess datasets into bivariate sequences consisting of <Key, Context([1, c])> pairs. These c bivariate sequences are then input into c LSTM networks with l layers to extract feature sets. Using these feature sets, a CNN layer outputs a predicted profile of power demand. To assess the applicability of the proposed hybrid method, we conduct extensive experiments using real-world datasets. The results of the experiments indicate that the proposed (c, l)-LSTM+CNN hybrid model performs with higher accuracy than previous approaches.