Probabilistic forecasting of renewable energy and electricity demand using Graph-based Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model

Abstract

Renewable energy production and the balance between production and demand have become increasingly crucial in modern power systems, necessitating accurate forecasting. Traditional deterministic methods fail to capture the inherent uncertainties associated with intermittent renewable sources and fluctuating demand patterns. This paper proposes a novel denoising diffusion method for multivariate time series probabilistic forecasting that explicitly models the interdependencies between variables through graph modeling. Our framework employs a parallel feature extraction module that simultaneously captures temporal dynamics and spatial correlations, enabling improved forecasting accuracy. Through extensive evaluation on two real-world datasets focused on renewable energy and electricity demand, we demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in probabilistic energy time series forecasting tasks. By explicitly modeling variable interdependencies and incorporating temporal information, our method provides reliable probabilistic forecasts, crucial for effective decision-making and resource allocation in the energy sector. Extensive experiments validate that our proposed method reduces the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS) by 2.1%–70.9%, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) by 4.4%–52.2%, and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) by 7.9%–53.4% over existing methods on two real-world datasets.

Keywords

• Multivariate time series
• Graph neural network
• Denoising diffusion probabilistic models
• Forecasting