A parallel evolutionary extreme learning machine scheme for electrical load prediction

Application of cloud computing technologies in power system has made a great contribution to the establishment of smart grid. Among applications of smart grid, electrical load prediction plays an important role in efficient use of power resource. However, the exponential growth of data has posed a great challenge to the existing algorithms. In this paper, we firstly propose a novel parallel hybrid algorithm, combining the Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) with ELM, named PIPSO-ELM. Here a modified particle swarm optimization is presented to find the optimal number of hidden neurons as well as the corresponding input weights and hidden biases. Furthermore, in the iterative search process of PSO, an update strategy employs the mutation operator of evolutionary algorithms is introduced for further improving the global search capability and convergence speed of PSO. After that, to handle the large-scale dataset efficiently, the parallel implementation of PIPSO-ELM is achieved using Spark. Finally, extensive experiments on real-life electrical load data and comprehensive evaluation are conducted to verify the performance of PIPSO-ELM in electrical load prediction. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PIPSO-ELM outperforms the compared algorithms in terms of stability, efficiency and scalability simultaneously.