Performance comparison of single and ensemble CNN, LSTM and traditional ANN models for short‐term electricity load forecasting

Abstract

Abstract The authors propose bagged and boosted convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long short‐term memory (LSTM) networks, and compare their performance with the bagged and boosted traditional shallow artificial neural networks (ANNs) for short‐term electricity load forecasting. Unlike existing references that mainly compare the performance of ensemble deep learning with single deep learning and machine learning techniques, three further performance comparisons are carried out: (1) bagged CNNs and bagged LSTMs, (2) boosted CNNs and LSTMs, and (3) bagged CNNs and bagged LSTMs, and boosted CNNs and LSTMs. This allows an insight into the individual effects of ensemble learning on CNNs and LSTMs. The proposed models' inputs consist of weather and time‐related features in addition to the past load. The use of these features allows CNNs and LSTMs to estimate further complex relationship between them and the load. We implement all these methods and compare their performance on the same New England electricity load forecasting data set via statistical analysis. Effects on the forecasting performance with reduced training data are further shown. The LSTM models have the largest performance variation and are also more sensitive to a reduction in training data. In these models, boosting can improve both prediction accuracy and consistency.