Electricity load forecasting for residential customers: Exploiting aggregation and correlation between households

The recent development of smart meters has allowed the analysis of household electricity consumption in real time. Predicting electricity consumption at such very low scales should help to increase the efficiency of distribution networks and energy pricing. However, this is by no means a trivial task since household-level consumption is much more irregular than at the transmission or distribution levels. In this work, we address the problem of improving consumption forecasting by using the statistical relations between consumption series. This is done both at the household and district scales (hundreds of houses), using various machine learning techniques, such as support vector machine for regression (SVR) and multilayer perceptron (MLP). First, we determine which algorithm is best adapted to each scale, then, we try to find leaders among the time series, to help short-term forecasting. We also improve the forecasting for district consumption by clustering houses according to their consumption profiles.