Forecasting household electricity demand with hybrid machine learning-based methods: Effects of residents’ psychological preferences and calendar variables

Faced with the explosive growth of population and rapid development of industrialization, household electricity demand (HED) has recently become an essential sector of energy demand. Very-short-term forecasting of HED is closely related to monitoring insecurity, detecting emergency and potential crisis. Consider challenges triggered by the characteristics of time series, firstly, a phase of data pre-processing with stationarity of time series is constructed to manage irregular trend factors. Subsequently, in the feature selection phase, a two-layer feature selection method is proposed with the combination of random forest and autocorrelation analysis to select the most relevant features, which simultaneously considers correlations and importance of input lagged variables as well as exogenous variables. After that, hybrid HED forecasting methods are constructed with incorporating multiple machine learning techniques in the forecasting phase, namely k-nearest neighbor, support vector regression, random forest and multilayer perceptron, using their respective advantages of managing different situations. As residents’ psychological preferences and calendar variables highly affect future HED, this paper intends to add and test their effects on HED. Finally, the proposed methods are examined on a 10-min-ahead horizon application, whose forecasting results, comparison analyses and an extended experiment are given to illustrate their effectiveness, after which some implications are provided to show the insights gained from the results.