On the impact of socio-economic factors on power load forecasting

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze a public dataset of electricity consumption collected over 3,800 households for one year and half. We show that some socio-economic factors are critical indicators to forecast households' daily peak (and total) load. By using a random forests model, we show that the daily load can be predicted accurately at a fine temporal granularity. Differently from many state-of-the-art techniques based on support vector machines, our model allows to derive a set of heuristic rules that are highly interpretable and easy to fuse with human experts domain knowledge. Lastly, we quantify the different importance of each socio-economic feature in the prediction task.