Hybrid partial least squares and neural network approach for short-term electrical load forecasting

Intelligent systems and methods such as the neural network (NN) are usually used in electric power systems for short-term electrical load forecasting. However, a vast amount of electrical load data is often redundant, and linearly or nonlinearly correlated with each other. Highly correlated input data can result in erroneous prediction results given out by an NN model. Besides this, the determination of the topological structure of an NN model has always been a problem for designers. This paper presents a new artificial intelligence hybrid procedure for next day electric load forecasting based on partial least squares (PLS) and NN. PLS is used for the compression of data input space, and helps to determine the structure of the NN model. The hybrid PLS-NN model can be used to predict hourly electric load on weekdays and weekends. The advantage of this methodology is that the hybrid model can provide faster convergence and more precise prediction results in comparison with abductive networks algorithm. Extensive testing on the electrical load data of the Puget power utility in the USA confirms the validity of the proposed approach.