Global vs. Local Models for Short-Term Electricity Demand Prediction in a Residential/Lodging Scenario

Electrical load forecasting has a fundamental role in the decision-making process of energy system operators. When many users are connected to the grid, high-performance forecasting models are required, posing several problems associated with the availability of historical energy consumption data for each end-user and training, deploying and maintaining a model for each user. Moreover, introducing new end-users to an existing network poses problems relating to their forecasting model. Global models, trained on all available data, are emerging as the best solution in several contexts, because they show higher generalization performance, being able to leverage the patterns that are similar across different time series. In this work, the lodging/residential electricity 1-h-ahead load forecasting of multiple time series for smart grid applications is addressed using global models, suggesting the effectiveness of such an approach also in the energy context. Results obtained on a subset of the Great Energy Predictor III dataset with several global models are compared to results obtained with local models based on the same methods, showing that global models can perform similarly to the local ones, while presenting simpler deployment and maintainability. In this work, the forecasting of a new time series, representing a new end-user introduced in the pre-existing network, is also approached under specific assumptions, by using a global model trained using data related to the existing end-users. Results reveal that the forecasting model pre-trained on data related to other end-users allows the attainment of good forecasting performance also for new end-users