Probabilistic Residential Load Forecasting with Sequence-to-Sequence Adversarial Domain Adaptation Networks

Lately, the power demand of consumers is increasing in distribution networks, while renewable power generation keeps penetrating into the distribution networks. Insufficient data make it hard to accurately predict the new residential load or newly built apartments with volatile and changing time-series characteristics in terms of frequency and magnitude. Hence, this paper proposes a short-term probabilistic residential load forecasting scheme based on transfer learning and deep learning techniques. First, we formulate the short-term probabilistic residential load forecasting problem. Then, we propose a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) adversarial domain adaptation network and its joint training strategy to transfer generic features from the source domain (with massive consumption records of regular loads) to the target domain (with limited observations of new residential loads) and simultaneously minimize the domain difference and forecasting errors when solving the forecasting problem. For implementation, the dominant techniques or elements are used as the submodules of the Seq2Seq adversarial domain adaptation network, including the Seq2Seq recurrent neural networks (RNNs) composed of a long short-term memory (LSTM) encoder and an LSTM decoder, and quantile loss. Finally, this study conducts the case studies via multiple evaluation indices, comparative methods of classic machine learning and advanced deep learning, and various available data of the new residentical loads and other regular loads. The experimental results validate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed scheme.