LSTM-based Short-term Load Forecasting for Building Electricity Consumption

Abstract

The unprecedented level of flexibility in energy management is required to ensure the balance of real-time energy production and consumption. Accurate short-term load forecasting (STLF) is vital for making the intelligent operation scheme. However, conventional forecasting techniques may not meet the increasingly demanding precision in load forecasting. This paper presents a novel energy load forecasting methodology based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), specifically Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) algorithms. The proposed LSTM-based model was trained and tested on a benchmark dataset which contained electricity consumption data for different kinds of buildings in America with onehour resolution. The comparative models including multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLP), random forest (RF), and kernelized support vector machine (SVM) was also tested on the same dataset. The week-ahead forecasting results have shown that the proposed LSTM-based model outdoes the three comparative models in nine of twelve months.