Multi-node load forecasting based on multi-task learning with modal feature extraction

Accurate multi-node load forecasting is the key to the safe, reliable, and economical operation of the power system. However, the dynamic nature of load and the coupling nature of networks are difficult to extract, making consistent and accurate forecasting of node load rather difficult. In this regard, this paper proposes a soft sharing multi-task deep learning method for multi-node load forecasting in the power system. It has the following aspects: (1) Considering the coupling characteristics of the node network, a multi-modal feature module, based on the inception strategy and gated temporal convolutional network (GTCN), is firstly designed to explore the coupling features implied in the node load data. (2) A novel multi-objective neural network model is proposed to achieve simultaneous prediction of multi-node load by integrating the multi-modal feature module and gated recurrent unit (GRU). For sharing the learning information of sub-networks, this paper uses the soft sharing mechanism to capture load features, which can better optimize the prediction task for each node load simultaneously. Load data from the New Zealand distribution network and AEMO are used to compare the proposed model's performance in various scenarios using regression metrics such as mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), Weighted Mean Accuracy (WMA), root mean squared logarithmic error (RMSLE), and Diebold–Mariano (DM). The simulation results show that the proposed method can explore the spatial–temporal coupling characteristics in multi-node load data. Compared with existing state-of-the-art multi-node load prediction methods, our proposed method's MAPE decrease 17.04% and 3.92% in Non-aggregation and Aggregation situations.