Download PDFOpen PDF in browser

Reducing error propagation for long term energy forecasting using multivariate prediction

9 pagesPublished: March 9, 2020

Abstract

Many statistical and machine learning models for prediction make use of historical data as an input and produce single or small numbers of output values. To forecast over many timesteps, it is necessary to run the program recursively. This leads to a compounding of errors, which has adverse effects on accuracy for long forecast periods. In this paper, we show this can be mitigated through the addition of generating features which can have an “anchoring” effect on recurrent forecasts, limiting the amount of compounded error in the long term. This is studied experimentally on a benchmark energy dataset using two machine learning models LSTM and XGBoost. Prediction accuracy over differing forecast lengths is compared using the forecasting MAPE. It is found that for LSTM model the accuracy of short term energy forecasting by using a past energy consumption value as a feature is higher than the accuracy when not using past values as a feature. The opposite behavior takes place for the long term energy forecasting. For the XGBoost model, the accuracy for both short and long term energy forecasting is higher when not using past values as a feature.

Keyphrases: Energy Forecasting, LSTM, machine learning, neural network, XGBoost regression.

In: Gordon Lee and Ying Jin (editors). Proceedings of 35th International Conference on Computers and Their Applications, vol 69, pages 161--169

Links:
BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{CATA2020:Reducing_error_propagation_for,
  author    = {Maher Selim and Ryan Zhou and Wenying Feng and Omar Alam},
  title     = {Reducing error propagation for long term energy forecasting using multivariate prediction},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of 35th International Conference on Computers and Their Applications},
  editor    = {Gordon Lee and Ying Jin},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {69},
  pages     = {161--169},
  year      = {2020},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {https://easychair.org/publications/paper/z3pS},
  doi       = {10.29007/mbb7}}
Download PDFOpen PDF in browser