Enhanced Machine-Learning Techniques for Medium-Term and Short-Term Electric-Load Forecasting in Smart Grids

Nowadays, electric load forecasting through a data analytic approach has become one of the most active and emerging research areas. It provides future consumption patterns of electric load. Since there are large fluctuations in both electricity production and use, it is a difficult task to achieve a balance between electric load and demand. By analyzing past electric consumption records to estimate the upcoming electricity load, the issue of fluctuating behavior can be resolved. In this study, a framework for feature selection, extraction, and regression is put forward to carry out the electric load prediction. The feature selection phase uses a combination of extreme gradient boosting (XGB) and random forest (RF) to determine the significance of each feature. Redundant features in the feature extraction approach are removed by applying recursive feature elimination (RFE). We propose an enhanced support vector machine (ESVM) and an enhanced convolutional neural network (ECNN) for the regression component. Hyperparameters of both the proposed approaches are set using the random search (RS) technique. To illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategies, a comparison is also performed between the state-of-the-art approaches and our proposed techniques. In addition, we perform statistical analyses to prove the significance of our proposed approaches. Simulation findings illustrate that our proposed approaches ECNN and ESVM achieve higher accuracies of 98.83% and 98.7%, respectively.