Data-Driven Load Pattern Identification Based on R-Vine Copula and Random Forest Method

Massive residential power consumption information provides data support for the mining and analysis of load patterns. This article proposes a complete framework for load pattern identification, which mainly includes the clustering module and the classification module. Considering that the high-dimensional load profiling dataset will bring a heavy computational burden, multiple dimensional scaling is introduced in the process of data preprocessing. Then, an innovative mixture model based on regular vine copula mixture model (RVMM) is adopted for clustering typical load patterns. Finally, a random forest (RF) classifier constructed with certain load characteristic indexes and RVMM clustering results is employed as a supervised classification model to predict the categories of subsequent new customers, and the accuracy is calculated by the 10-fold cross-validation. It is demonstrated in the case study that the proposed RVMM algorithm exhibits better performance in the clustering validity evaluation. Besides, higher accuracy is achieved by the RF classifier.