Advanced ML-Based Ensemble and Deep Learning Models for Short-Term Load Forecasting: Comparative Analysis Using Feature Engineering

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) plays a pivotal role in the electricity industry because it helps reduce, generate, and operate costs by balancing supply and demand. Recently, the challenge in STLF has been the load variation that occurs in each period, day, and seasonality. This work proposes the bagging ensemble combining two machine learning (ML) models—linear regression (LR) and support vector regression (SVR). For comparative analysis, the performance of the proposed model is evaluated and compared with three advanced deep learning (DL) models, namely, the deep neural network (DNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN)+LSTM models. These models are trained and tested on the data collected from the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) with four different input features. The forecasting performance is measured considering mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean squared error (MSE) parameters. Using several input features, experimental results show that the integrated model provides better accuracy than others. Therefore, it can be revealed that our approach could improve accuracy using different data in different forecasting fields.