Short term residential load forecasting using long short-term memory recurrent neural network

Load forecasting plays an essential role in power system planning. The efficiency and reliability of the whole power system can be increased with proper planning and organization. Residential load forecasting is indispensable due to its increasing role in the smart grid environment. Nowadays, smart meters can be deployed at the residential level for collecting historical data consumption of residents. Although the employment of smart meters ensures large data availability, the inconsistency of load data makes it challenging and taxing to forecast accurately. Therefore, the traditional forecasting techniques may not suffice the purpose. However, a deep learning forecasting network-based long short-term memory (LSTM) is proposed in this paper. The powerful nonlinear mapping capabilities of RNN in time series make it effective along with the higher learning capabilities of long sequences of LSTM. The proposed method is tested and validated through available real-world data sets. A comparison of LSTM is then made with two traditionally available techniques, exponential smoothing and auto-regressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA). Real data from 12 houses over three months is used to evaluate and validate the performance of load forecasts performed using the three mentioned techniques. LSTM model has achieved the best results due to its higher capability of memorizing large data in time series-based predictions.