An Empirical Mode Decomposition-Based Hybrid Model for Sub-Hourly Load Forecasting

Sub-hourly load forecasting can provide accurate short-term load forecasts, which is important for ensuring a secure operation and minimizing operating costs. Decomposition algorithms are suitable for extracting sub-series and improving forecasts in the context of short-term load forecasting. However, some existing algorithms like singular spectrum analysis (SSA) struggle to decompose high sampling frequencies and rapidly changing sub-hourly load series due to inherent flaws. Considering this, we propose an empirical mode decomposition-based hybrid model, named EMDHM. The decomposition part of this novel model first detrends the linear and periodic components from the original series. The remaining detrended long-range correlation series is simplified using empirical mode decomposition (EMD), generating intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Fluctuation analysis is employed to identify high-frequency information, which divide IMFs into two types of long-range series. In the forecasting part, linear and periodic components are predicted by linear and trigonometric functions, while two long-range components are fitted by long short-term memory (LSTM) for prediction. Four forecasting series are ensembled to find the final result of EMDHM. In experiments, the model’s framework we propose is highly suitable for handling sub-hourly load datasets. The MAE, RMSE, MARNE, and R 2 of EMDHM have improved by 20.1%, 26.8%, 22.1%, and 5.4% compared to single LSTM, respectively. Furthermore, EMDHM can handle both short- and long-sequence, sub-hourly load forecasting tasks. Its R 2 only decreases by 4.7% when the prediction length varies from 48 to 720, which is significantly lower than other models.