Boosting Based Multiple Kernel Learning and Transfer Regression for Electricity Load Forecasting

Accurate electricity load forecasting is of crucial importance for power system operation and smart grid energy management. Different factors, such as weather conditions, lagged values, and day types may affect electricity load consumption. We propose to use multiple kernel learning (MKL) for electricity load forecasting, as it provides more flexibilities than traditional kernel methods. Computation time is an important issue for short-term load forecasting, especially for energy scheduling demand. However, conventional MKL methods usually lead to complicated optimization problems. Another practical aspect of this application is that there may be very few data available to train a reliable forecasting model for a new building, while at the same time we may have prior knowledge learned from other buildings. In this paper, we propose a boosting based framework for MKL regression to deal with the aforementioned issues for short-term load forecasting. In particular, we first adopt boosting to learn an ensemble of multiple kernel regressors, and then extend this framework to the context of transfer learning. Experimental results on residential data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.