A novel short‐term load forecasting approach based on kernel extreme learning machine: A provincial case in China

Abstract With the rapid development of re‐electrification, traditional load forecasting faces a significant increase of influencing factors. Existing literature focuses on examining the influencing factors related to load profiles in order to improve the prediction accuracy. However, a large number of redundant features may lead to the overfitting of the forecasting engine. To enhance the performance of extreme learning machine (ELM) under massive data scale, this paper presents a kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) based method which can be used for short‐term load prediction. First, a feature dimensionality reduction is performed using a kernelized principal component analysis, which aims to eliminate redundant input vectors. Then, the hyperparameters of KELM are optimized to improve the prediction accuracy and generalization. Case studies based on a province‐level power system in China demonstrate that the presented method can significantly improve the accuracy of load forecasting by 3.14% in contrast to traditional ELM.