Smart-Meter Big Data for Load Forecasting: An Alternative Approach to Clustering
Negin Alemazkoor, Mazdak Tootkaboni, Roshanak Nateghi, Arghavan Louhghalam
Abstract
Accurate forecasting of electricity demand is vital to the resilient management of energy systems. Recent efforts in harnessing smart-meter data to improve forecasting accuracy have primarily centered around cluster-based approaches (CBAs), where smart-meter data are grouped into a small number of clusters and separate prediction models are developed for each cluster. The cluster-based predictions are then aggregated to compute the total demand. CBAs have provided promising results compared to conventional approaches that are generally not conducive to integrating smart-meter data. However, CBAs are computationally costly and suffer from the curse of dimensionality, especially under scenarios involving smart-meter data from millions of customers. In this work, we propose an efficient reduced model approach (RMA) that leverages a novel hierarchical dimension reduction algorithm to enable the integration of fine-resolution high-dimensional smart-meter data for millions of customers in load prediction. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed approach by using data from a utility company, based in Illinois, United States, with more than 3.7 million customers and present model performance in-terms of forecast accuracy. The proposed hierarchical dimension reduction approach enables utilizing the high-resolution data from smart-meters in a scalable manner that is not exploitable otherwise. The results shows significant improvements in forecast accuracy compared to the available approaches that either do not harness fine-resolution data or are not scalable to large-scale smart-meter big data.