Power Demand Forecasting through Social Network Activity and Artificial Neural Networks

Long-term and short-term term national power demand forecasting is a well known and open issue for many countries. In this paper, we focus and study the short-term Peruvian national power demand forecasting. Thus, we tackle this problem using indirect and direct method for prediction. The former method relies on Social Network Activity to estimate national needs using regression models. The latter method is based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The network was used subsequently for predictions of the power for the last day of April, May and June 2016.The result was highly satisfactory with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.36 % for April and 0.34% in May and June. The ANN cumulative model proved to be a fast, reliable and accurate method for predicting power demand in Peru. In the case of the social activity generated by tweets, there is an increase in the MAPE values of an order of magnitude, reaching a maximum value of 7.3% for June. Nevertheless, the power demand forecasting using Twitter posts is a good indicator as a first approximation.