An Ensemble Forecasting Method for the Aggregated Load With Subprofiles

With the prevalence of smart meters, fine-grained subprofiles reveal more information about the aggregated load and further help improve the forecasting accuracy. Ensemble is an effective approach for load forecasting. It either generates multiple training datasets or applies multiple forecasting models to produce multiple forecasts. In this letter, a novel ensemble method is proposed to forecast the aggregated load with subprofiles where the multiple forecasts are produced by different groupings of subprofiles. Specifically, the subprofiles are first clustered into different groups and forecasting is conducted on the grouped load profiles individually. Thus, these forecasts can be summed to form the aggregated load forecast. In this way, different aggregated load forecasts can be obtained by varying the number of clusters. Finally, an optimal weighted ensemble approach is employed to combine these forecasts and provide the final forecasting result. Case studies are conducted on two open datasets and verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.