Unified Quantile Regression Deep Neural Network with Time-Cognition for Probabilistic Residential Load Forecasting

Residential load forecasting is important for many entities in the electricity market, but the load profile of single residence shows more volatilities and uncertainties. Due to the difficulty in producing reliable point forecasts, probabilistic load forecasting becomes more popular as a result of catching the volatility and uncertainty by intervals, density, or quantiles. In this paper, we propose a unified quantile regression deep neural network with time-cognition for tackling this challenging issue. At first, a convolutional neural network with multiscale convolution is devised for extracting more behavioral features from the historical load sequence. In addition, a novel periodical coding method marks the model to enhance its ability of capturing regular load pattern. Then, features generated from both subnetworks are fused and fed into the forecasting model with an end-to-end manner. Besides, a globally differentiable quantile loss function constrains the whole network for training. At last, forecasts of multiple quantiles are directly generated in one shot. With ablation experiments, the proposed model achieved the best results in the AQS, AACE, and inversion error, and especially the average of the AACE is grown by 34.71%, 75.22%, and 32.44% compared with QGBRT, QCNN, and QLSTM, respectively, indicating that our method has excellent reliability and robustness rather than the state-of-the-art models obviously. Meanwhile, great performances of efficient time response demonstrate that our proposed work has promising prospects in practical applications.