Electric vehicles charging stations load forecasting based on hybrid XGBoost-BiLSTM model

Abstract Accurate load forecasting for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCS) is critical for optimizing energy management and ensuring grid stability amid growing electric vehicle adoption. This study investigates short-term, hourly load forecasting at the station level using a hybrid XGBoost–BiLSTM stacking model (Hybrid 3) with an XGBoost meta-learner. From the Adaptive Charging Network (ACN–Caltech) dataset (April 25, 2018–September 13, 2021), 31,424 raw charging sessions were preprocessed, yielding 14,496 cleaned sessions for modeling. These were split into 80% training and 20% testing sets using a fixed random seed (42) for reproducibility. Hybrid 3 was benchmarked against 24 alternative models spanning statistical (e.g., Persistence, SARIMAX), machine learning (e.g., XGBoost, LightGBM), deep learning (e.g., BiLSTM, CNN), and ensemble methods. On cleaned data, Hybrid 3 achieved an MAE of 2.6870 kWh and R 2 = 0.6395—a 3.4% improvement over standalone BiLSTM—while slightly underperforming the top Boosting ensemble (XGBoost + BiLSTM + LightGBM). Robustness was confirmed via five-fold walk-forward validation (mean MAE = 2.5351 kWh, SD = 1.2885). Cross-site evaluation on an independent synthetic dataset (n = 1,965,239 sessions) showed reduced generalization, highlighting site-specific temporal patterns. One-Way ANOVA (p = 0.2073, η 2 = 0.2062) indicated no statistically significant but practically relevant differences among top models. Feature importance analysis identified log-transformed charging duration (importance = 0.376) as the dominant predictor, aligning with real-world EV behavior. Overall, Hybrid 3 balances accuracy and complexity effectively, though gradient-boosting ensembles remain preferable for scalable, real-time EVCS forecasting.