Boost short-term load forecasts with synthetic data from transferred latent space information

Sustainable energy systems are characterised by an increased integration of renewable energy sources, which magnifies the fluctuations in energy supply. Methods to to cope with these magnified fluctuations, such as load shifting, typically require accurate short-term load forecasts. Although numerous machine learning models have been developed to improve short-term load forecasting (STLF), these models often require large amounts of training data. Unfortunately, such data is usually not available, for example, due to new users or privacy concerns. Therefore, obtaining accurate short-term load forecasts with little data is a major challenge. The present paper thus proposes the latent space-based forecast enhancer (LSFE), a method which combines transfer learning and data augmentation to enhance STLF when training data is limited. The LSFE first trains a generative model on source data similar to the target data before using the latent space data representation of the target data to generate seed noise. Finally, we use this seed noise to generate synthetic data, which we combine with real data to enhance STLF. We evaluate the LSFE on real-world electricity data by examining the influence of its components, analysing its influence on obtained forecasts, and comparing its performance to benchmark models. We show that the Latent Space-based Forecast Enhancer is generally capable of improving the forecast accuracy and thus helps to successfully meet the challenge of limited available training data.