Short-term load forecasting of multi-scale recurrent neural networks based on residual structure

Accurate short-term load forecasting plays an important role in reducing power generation costs, maintaining supply and demand balance, and stabling the power grids operation. In recent years, deep learning models based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) have been widely used in short-term load forecasting. Nevertheless, RNN cannot extract multi-scale features of load data, resulting in low forecasting accuracy. A model for short-term power load forecasting of residual multiscale-RNN (RM-RNN) was proposed in this study. RM-RNN uses the multilayer RNN network structure. Specifically, each layer sets the dilated convolution with different dilated coefficients to extract the multi-scale features of the load data. Adjacent networks transfer feature information for feature fusion through the residual structures. The experiment used random sampling data training model, and compared RM-RNN with multiple deep learning models. The experimental results demonstrated that the mean error of RM-RNN prediction is the lowest, indicating that dilated convolution can effectively extract multi-scale features of load data. This result verified the effectiveness of residual structure fusion features, and improved the accuracy of short-term load forecasting.