Stacking Deep learning and Machine learning models for short-term energy consumption forecasting

Accurate prediction of electricity consumption is essential for providing actionable insights to decision-makers for managing volume and potential trends in future energy consumption for efficient resource management. A single model might not be sufficient to solve the challenges that result from linear and non-linear problems that occur in electricity consumption prediction. Moreover, these models cannot be applied in practice because they are either not interpretable or poorly generalized. In this paper, a stacking ensemble model for short-term electricity consumption is proposed. We experimented with machine learning and deep models like Random Forests, Long Short Term Memory, Deep Neural Networks, and Evolutionary Trees as our base models. Based on the experimental observations, two different ensemble models are proposed, where the predictions of the base models are combined using Gradient Boosting and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB). The proposed ensemble models were tested on a standard dataset that contains around 500,000 electricity consumption values, measured at periodic intervals, over the span of 9 years. Experimental validation revealed that the proposed ensemble model built on XGB reduces the training time of the second layer of the ensemble by a factor of close to 10 compared to the state-of-the-art , and also is more accurate. An average reduction of approximately 39% was observed in the Root mean square error.