Monthly energy consumption forecast: A deep learning approach

Every year, energy consumption grows world widely. Therefore, power companies need to investigate models to better forecast and plan the energy use. One approach to address this problem is the estimation of energy consumption in the customer level. Energy consumption forecasting problem is a time series regression task. It consists of predicting the energy consumption for the next month given a finite history of a customer. Machine learning techniques have shown promising results in a variety of problems including time series and regression problems. Part of these promising results are attributed to deep neural networks. Although investigated in other domains, deep architectures have not been used to address the energy consumption prediction problem. In this work, we propose a system to predict monthly energy consumption using deep learning techniques. Three deep learning models were studied: Deep Fully Connected, Convolutional and Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks. Due to the sensitivity of these models to the input range, normalization techniques were also investigated. The proposed system was validated with real data of almost a million customers (resulting in over 9 million samples). Results showed that our system can predict monthly energy consumption with an absolute error of 31.83 kWh and a relative error of 17.29%.