A Two-Stage Multistep-Ahead Electricity Load Forecasting Scheme Based on LightGBM and Attention-BiLSTM

An efficient energy operation strategy for the smart grid requires accurate day-ahead electricity load forecasts with high time resolutions, such as 15 or 30 min. Most high-time resolution electricity load prediction techniques deal with a single output prediction, so their ability to cope with sudden load changes is limited. Multistep-ahead forecasting addresses this problem, but conventional multistep-ahead prediction models suffer from deterioration in prediction performance as the prediction range is expanded. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage multistep-ahead forecasting model that combines a single-output forecasting model and a multistep-ahead forecasting model to solve the aforementioned problem. In the first stage, we perform a single-output prediction based on recent electricity load data using a light gradient boosting machine with time-series cross-validation, and feed it to the second stage. In the second stage, we construct a multistep-ahead forecasting model that applies an attention mechanism to sequence-to-sequence bidirectional long short-term memory (S2S ATT-BiLSTM). Compared to the single S2S ATT-BiLSTM model, our proposed model achieved improvements of 3.23% and 4.92% in mean absolute percentage error and normalized root mean square error, respectively.