From Dense to Sparse: Event Response for Enhanced Residential Load Forecasting

Residential load forecasting (RLF) is crucial for resource scheduling in power systems. Most existing methods use all given load records (dense data) to indiscriminately extract the dependencies between historical and future time series. However, there exist important regular patterns residing in the event-related associations among different appliances (sparse knowledge), which have yet been ignored. In this article, we propose an event-response knowledge-guided (ERKG) approach for RLF by incorporating the estimation of electricity usage events for different appliances, mining event-related sparse knowledge from the load series. With ERKG, the event-response estimation enables portraying the electricity consumption behaviors of residents, revealing regular variations in appliance operational states. To be specific, ERKG consists of knowledge extraction and guidance: 1) a forecasting model is designed for the electricity usage events by estimating appliance operational states, aiming to extract the event-related sparse knowledge and 2) a novel knowledge-guided mechanism is established by fusing such state estimates of the appliance events into the RLF model, which can give particular focuses on the patterns of users’ electricity consumption behaviors. Notably, ERKG can flexibly serve as a plug-in module to boost the capability of existing forecasting models by leveraging event response. In numerical experiments, extensive comparisons and ablation studies have verified the effectiveness of our ERKG, e.g., over 8% MAE can be reduced on the tested state-of-the-art forecasting models. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ergoucao/ERKG.