Ultra-short-term Load Forecasting Based on XGBoost-BiGRU

High-precision load forecasting serves as the foundation for power grid scheduling planning and safe economic operation. In scenarios where only historical power load data is available without other external information, fully exploiting meaningful features from the temporal load sequence is crucial for improving the accuracy of load forecasting. Therefore, an ultra-short-term load forecasting method that combines eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) is proposed in this paper. Considering various factors that affect loads, a candidate feature set is established, which includes temporal information and historical loads. XGBoost is used to select the features that contribute significantly to load forecasting, forming an optimal feature set. These optimal features are then used as inputs to the BiGRU, and the bayesian optimization algorithm is applied to optimize the network hyperparameters. Then the load forecasting model for the next 15 minutes based on BiGRU is generated by training iteratively. The proposed XGBoost-BiGRU method is validated on real load data from a province in China. Experimental results demonstrate that the method can effectively avoid the impact of redundant features, improving both prediction accuracy and efficiency. The research has significant importance for guiding real-time supply-demand balance calculations and scheduling in power grids.