A short-term load forecasting method considering multiple feature factors based on long short-term memory and an improved temporal convolutional network

In order to address the problems of multi-factor coupling difficulties and low prediction efficiency of existing short-term electricity load forecasting methods, in this paper a short-term load forecasting method is proposed that combines the maximum mutual information coefficient (MIC) algorithm and the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-Improved Temporal Convolutional Network (ITCN) model. Second, based on the problem of low prediction efficiency of the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), the TCN was improved (ITCN) by using the single residual block structure and the parallel activation function structure. Finally, the LSTM-ITCN model is designed to extract the short-term temporal features of the given data using LSTM first, and extract the long-term temporal features of the given data using ITCN and make the final prediction. Comparison experiments with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-LSTM, CNN-Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BIGRU), and other prediction methods on different datasets are conducted, and the findings indicate that the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Coefficient of Determination ($R^2$), and Running times values of the proposed method are improved by 10.56%, 10.48%, 8.45%, and 25.64%, respectively, which significantly improves the prediction accuracy and prediction efficiency.