Explainable deeply-fused nets electricity demand prediction model: Factoring climate predictors for accuracy and deeper insights with probabilistic confidence interval and point-based forecasts

Electricity consumption has stochastic variabilities driven by the energy market volatility. The capability to predict electricity demand that captures stochastic variances and uncertainties is significantly important in the planning, operation and regulation of national electricity markets. This study has proposed an explainable deeply-fused nets electricity demand prediction model that factors in the climate-based predictors for enhanced accuracy and energy market insight analysis, generating point-based and confidence interval predictions of daily electricity demand. The proposed hybrid approach is built using Deeply Fused Nets (FNET) that comprises of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BILSTM) Network with residual connection. The study then contributes to a new deep fusion model that integrates intermediate representations of the base networks (fused output being the input of the remaining part of each base network) to perform these combinations deeply over several intermediate representations to enhance the demand predictions. The results are evaluated with statistical metrics and graphical representations of predicted and observed electricity demand, benchmarked with standalone models i.e., BILSTM, LSTMCNN, deep neural network, multi-layer perceptron, multivariate adaptive regression spline, kernel ridge regression and Gaussian process of regression. The end part of the proposed FNET model applies residual bootstrapping where final residuals are computed from predicted and observed demand to generate the 95% prediction intervals, analysed using probabilistic metrics to quantify the uncertainty associated with FNETS objective model. To enhance the FNET model’s transparency, the SHapley Additive explanation (SHAP) method has been applied to elucidate the relationships between electricity demand and climate-based predictor variables. The suggested model analysis reveals that the preceding hour’s electricity demand and evapotranspiration were the most influential factors that positively impacting current electricity demand. These findings underscore the FNET model’s capacity to yield accurate and insightful predictions, advocating its utility in predicting electricity demand and analysis of energy markets for decision-making.