| Summary: | Accurate electricity consumption forecasting in the power grids ensures efficient generation and distribution of electricity. Keeping this in mind, the paper introduces a novel deep learning model, termed Gated-FCN, for short-term load forecasting. The key idea is to introduce an automated feature selection and deep learning model for forecasting. The model includes an eight-layered Fully Convolutional Network (FCN-8) in which the hand-crafted feature selection that requires expert domain knowledge is avoided. Furthermore, the model also reduces noise as it learns internal dependencies and the correlation of the time series. Enhanced Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (EBiGRU) is used in combination with FCN-8 to learn long-term temporal dependencies of the time series. Moreover, a weighted averaging mechanism of multiple snapshot models is adopted in the proposed model to assign optimized weights to BiGRU. At the end of FCN-8 and BiGRU, a fully connected dense layer is used that gives final prediction results. Gated-FCN is an end-to-end forecasting model that does not require any other model for enhancing its forecasting efficiency. Different activation functions are initially analyzed to determine how the proposed model learns complex patterns from the time series data. Later, the activation function having the best accuracy is used for forecasting. The proposed model extracts both spatial and temporal features from the data. Furthermore, this paper also provides predictive and exploratory data analyses to assist policymakers in making optimal decisions regarding power production and dispatch. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed technique, the simulations are performed using nine years’ load consumption data taken from Independent System Operators New England (ISO-NE). The comparison with five state-of-the-art techniques is also provided to prove the fact that Gated-FCN gives the best forecasting accuracy as compared to other benchmark techniques in terms of two performance metrics: Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).
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