Abstract
By virtue of the steady societal shift to the use of smart technologies built on the increasingly popular smart grid framework, we have noticed an increase in the need to analyze household electricity consumption at the individual level. In order to work efficiently, these technologies rely on load forecasting to optimize operations that are related to energy consumption (such as household appliance scheduling). This paper proposes a novel load forecasting method that utilizes a clustering step prior to the forecasting step to group together days that exhibit similar energy consumption patterns. Following that, we attempt to classify new days into pre-generated clusters by making use of the available context information (day of the week, month, predicted weather). Finally, using available historical data (with regard to energy consumption) alongside meteorological and temporal variables, we train a CNN-LSTM model on a per-cluster basis that specializes in forecasting based on the energy profiles present within each cluster. This method leads to improvements in forecasting performance (upwards of a 10% increase in mean absolute percentage error scores) and provides us with the added benefit of being able to easily highlight and extract information that allows us to identify which external variables have an effect on the energy consumption of any individual household.