Probabilistic-based electricity demand forecasting with hybrid convolutional neural network-extreme learning machine model

Implementing key engineering solutions to optimise the operation of energy industries requires daily electricity demand forecasting and including uncertainty, to promote markets insight analysis as part of their strategic planning, regulating and supplying electricity to consumers. This paper proposes hybrid artificial intelligence models combining convolutional neural networks (CNN) as a feature extraction algorithm with extreme learning machines (ELM) as a framework to predict electricity demand with confidence intervals generated by Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) approaches. In order to develop CELM-KDE model, time-lagged series of daily electricity demand with local climate variables based on the air temperature, atmospheric vapour pressure, evaporation, solar radiation, humidity and sea level pressures are used to train the proposed CELMKDE hybrid model. In order to fully evaluate the newly developed model from a point-based, as well as a probabilistic prediction strategy, the observed and predicted electricity demand as well as the probability distribution of errors are analysed using KDE method that operates without prior data distribution assumptions. Based on observed and predicted electricity demand and the relevant probabilistic confidence intervals generated by the CELM-KDE model, the final results show that the proposed method attains significantly better probability interval predictions than traditionally-used point-based models. The proposed CELM-KDE model is demonstrated to be highly effective in providing a comprehensive coverage of predicted errors, as well as providing greater insights into the average bandwidth and detailed predicted electricity demand in the testing stage. The results also indicate that the proposed hybrid model is a reliable decision support tool to develop engineering solutions in area of energy modelling, monitoring and forecasting, which could potentially be useful to the industry policymakers. We show that the point -and probabilistic-based electricity demand predictive models can be employed as an effective tool to improve accuracy of forecasting and provision of insights for national electricity markets and key energy industry stakeholder application tools.