Evolutionary Hybrid System for Energy Consumption Forecasting for Smart Meters

The usage of smart grids is growing steadily around the world. This technology has been proposed as a promising solution to enhance energy efficiency and improve consumption management in buildings. Such benefits are usually associated with the ability of accurately forecasting energy demand. However, the energy consumption series forecasting is a challenge for statistical linear and Machine Learning (ML) techniques due to temporal fluctuations and the presence of linear and non-linear patterns. Traditional statistical techniques are able to model linear patterns, while obtaining poor results in forecasting the non-linear component of the time series. ML techniques are data-driven and can model non-linear patterns, but their feature selection process and parameter specification are a complex task. This paper proposes an Evolutionary Hybrid System (EvoHyS) which combines statistical and ML techniques through error series modeling. EvoHyS is composed of three phases: (i) forecast of the linear and seasonal component of the time series using a Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model, (ii) forecast of the error series using an ML technique, and (iii) combination of both linear and non-linear forecasts from (i) and (ii) using a a secondary ML model. EvoHyS employs a Genetic Algorithm (GA) for feature selection and hyperparameter optimization in phases (ii) and (iii) aiming to improve its accuracy. An experimental evaluation was conducted using consumption energy data of a smart grid in a one-step-ahead scenario. The proposed hybrid system reaches statistically significant improvements when compared to other statistical, hybrid, and ML approaches from the literature utilizing well known metrics, such as Mean Squared Error (MSE).