Short-Term Load Forecasting Based on Mutual Information and BI-LSTM Considering Fluctuation in Importance Values of Features

In short-term load forecasting, deep learning models with recurrent units are widely used. For Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) models, in terms of the input features at one particular time-step, there is a weight series for each input feature. Hence, an input feature with a larger value of weight can be regarded as more important to the final forecasting result. Since the weights of the features are time-invariant, the model considers the input features as equally important at each time step, thus lack of the capability of reflecting the importance fluctuation through the time span. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a forecasting scheme, which integrates mutual information (MI) into bi-directional long short-term memory (BILSTM) network. The MI method is used to extract the importance value of input features at different time-steps, and constitute the fluctuation matrix of the importance values for input features, which is used as coefficients to correct the original input feature. The corrected features are substituted into the BILSTM network, which further improves the forecasting accuracy. Numerical experiments have been carried out based on real-world load data. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme compared with a series of state-of-the-art methods and thus indicate the importance and effectiveness of capturing the fluctuation of the importance value.