Comparison of robust machine-learning and deep-learning models for midterm electrical load forecasting

Electrical load forecasting (ELF) is gaining importance especially due to the severe impact of climate change on electrical energy usage and dynamically evolving smart grid technologies in the last decades. In this regard, medium-term load forecasting, a crucial need for power system planning (generation optimization and outages plan) and operation control, has become prominent in particular. Machine learning and deep learning-based techniques are currently trending approaches in electrical load estimation due to their capability to model complex non-linearity, feature abstraction and high accuracy, especially in the smart power systems environment. In this study, several load forecasting models based on machine learning methods which comprise linear regression (LR), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), gradient boosting, adaBoost, and deep learning techniques such as recurrent neural network (RNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) are studied for medium-term electrical load demand forecasting at an aggregated level. Performance metric results of these analyzes are presented in detail. State-of-the-art feature selection models are examined on the dataset and their effects on these forecasting methods are evaluated. Numerical results show that forecasting performance can be significantly improved. These results are validated by the results of other studies on the subject and found to be superior.