Clustering-based forecasting method for individual consumers electricity load using time series representations

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for forecasting a load of individual electricity consumers using smart grid data and clustering. The data from all consumers are used for clustering to create more suitable training sets to forecasting methods. Before clustering, time series are efficiently preprocessed by normalisation and the computation of various model-based time series representation methods. Final centroid-based forecasts are scaled by saved normalisation parameters to create the forecast for every consumer. Our method is compared with the approach that creates forecasts for every consumer separately. Evaluation and experiments were conducted on three smart meter datasets from residences of Ireland and Australia, and factories of Slovakia. The achieved results proved that our clustering-based method improves forecasting accuracy mainly for residential consumers. We can also proclaim that it can be found such time series representation and clustering setting that will our forecasting method perform more accurately than fully disaggregated approach. Our method is also more scalable since it is necessary to train the model only on clusters and not for every consumer separately.