Long Term Forecasting of Industrial Electricity Consumption Data With GRU, LSTM and Multiple Linear Regression

Sammanfattning: Accurate long-term energy consumption forecasting of industrial entities is of interest to distribution companies as it can potentially help reduce their churn and offer support in decision making when hedging. This thesis work presents different methods to forecast the energy consumption for industrial entities over a long time prediction horizon of 1 year. Notably, it includes experimentations with two variants of the Recurrent Neural Networks, namely Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM). Their performance is compared against traditional approaches namely Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA). Further on, the investigation focuses on tailoring the Recurrent Neural Network model to improve the performance. The experiments focus on the impact of different model architectures. Secondly, it focuses on testing the effect of time-related feature selection as an additional input to the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) networks. Specifically, it explored how traditional methods such as Exploratory Data Analysis, Autocorrelation, and Partial Autocorrelation Functions Plots can contribute to the performance of RNN model. The current work shows through an empirical study on three industrial datasets that GRU architecture is a powerful method for the long-term forecasting task which outperforms LSTM on certain scenarios. In comparison to the MLR model, the RNN achieved a reduction in the RMSE between 5% up to to 10%. The most important findings include: (i) GRU architecture outperforms LSTM on industrial energy consumption datasets when compared against a lower number of hidden units. Also, GRU outperforms LSTM on certain datasets, regardless of the choice units number; (ii) RNN variants yield a better accuracy than statistical or regression models; (iii) using ACF and PACF as dicovery tools in the feature selection process is unconclusive and unefficient when aiming for a general model; (iv) using deterministic features (such as day of the year, day of the month) has limited effects on improving the deep learning model’s performance.