A hierarchical hybrid neural model with time integrators in long-term load forecasting

A novel hierarchical hybrid neural model to the problem of long-term load forecasting is proposed in this paper. The neural model is made up of two self-organizing map nets-one on top of the other-and a single-layer perceptron. It has application into domains which require time series analysis. The model is compared to a mutilated architecture of it, and to a multilayer perceptron. The hierarchical, the mutilated, and the multilayer perceptron models are trained and assessed on load data extracted from a North-American electric utility. They are required to predict either once every week or once every month the electric peak-load during the next two years. The results from the experiments show that the performance of HHNM on long-term load forecasts is better than that of the mutilated model, and much better than that of the MLP model.