A Hybrid Approach for Energy Consumption Forecasting With a New Feature Engineering and Optimization Framework in Smart Grid

Electric energy consumption forecasting enables distribution system operators to perform efficient energy management by flexibly engaging energy consumers under the intelligent demand-response program in the smart grid (SG). With this motivation, in this paper, a fast and accurate hybrid electrical energy forecasting (FA-HELF) framework is developed. The proposed framework integrates two modules with support vector machine (SVM) based forecaster. These modules are data pre-processing and feature engineering, and modified enhanced differential evolution (mEDE) based optimizer. First, feature selection algorithms like random forests and relief-F are combined to devise a hybrid feature selection algorithm to alleviate redundancy. Secondly, for feature extraction, a radial basis Kernel-based principal component analysis algorithm is employed to eliminate the dimensionality reduction problem. Finally, to conduct accurate and fast electrical energy consumption forecasting, the mEDE based optimizer is integrated with the SVM based forecaster. The resulting FA-HELF framework is tested on publicly available independent system operator New England (ISO-NE) control area hourly load data. The results demonstrate that the FA-HELF framework is robust and shows significant improvements when compared to other benchmark frameworks in terms of accuracy and convergence speed.