Short-term load forecasting of microgrid via hybrid support vector regression and long short-term memory algorithms

© 2020 by the authors. Short-Term Load Forecasting (STLF) is the most appropriate type of forecasting for both electricity consumers and generators. In this paper, STLF in a Microgrid (MG) is performed via the hybrid applications of machine learning. The proposed model is a modified Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) called SVR-LSTM. In order to forecast the load, the proposed method is applied to the data related to a rural MG in Africa. Factors influencing the MG load, such as various household types and commercial entities, are selected as input variables and load profiles as target variables. Identifying the behavioral patterns of input variables as well as modeling their behavior in short-term periods of time are the major capabilities of the hybrid SVR-LSTM model. To present the efficiency of the suggested method, the conventional SVR and LSTM models are also applied to the used data. The results of the load forecasts by each network are evaluated using various statistical performance metrics. The obtained results show that the SVR-LSTM model with the highest correlation coefficient, i.e., 0.9901, is able to provide better results than SVR and LSTM, which have the values of 0.9770 and 0.9809, respectively. Finally, the results are compared with the results of other studies in this field, which continued to emphasize the superiority of the SVR-LSTM model