Short-Term Load Forecasting in the Greek Power Distribution System: A Comparative Study of Gradient Boosting and Deep Learning Models

Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is essential for efficient energy management, grid reliability, and cost optimization. This study presents a comprehensive comparison of five supervised learning models—Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), a hybrid (CNN-LSTM) architecture, and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM)—using multivariate data from the Greek electricity market between 2015 and 2024. The dataset incorporates hourly load, temperature, humidity, and holiday indicators. Extensive preprocessing was applied, including K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) imputation, time-based feature extraction, and normalization. Models were trained using a 70:20:10 train–validation–test split and evaluated with standard performance metrics: MAE, MSE, RMSE, NRMSE, MAPE, and R2. The experimental findings show that LightGBM beat deep learning (DL) models on all evaluation metrics and had the best MAE (69.12 MW), RMSE (101.67 MW), and MAPE (1.20%) and the highest R2 (0.9942) for the test set. It also outperformed models in the literature and operational forecasts conducted in the real world by ENTSO-E. Though LSTM performed well, particularly in long-term dependency capturing, it performed a bit worse in high-variance periods. CNN, GRU, and hybrid models demonstrated moderate results, but they tended to underfit or overfit in some circumstances. These findings highlight the efficacy of LightGBM in structured time-series forecasting tasks, offering a scalable and interpretable alternative to DL models. This study supports its potential for real-world deployment in smart/distribution grid applications and provides valuable insights into the trade-offs between accuracy, complexity, and generalization in load forecasting models.