Predicting Electricity Consumption with ARIMA and Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract: Due to the growing share of renewable energy in countries' power systems, the need for precise forecasting of electricity consumption will increase. This paper considers two different approaches to time series forecasting, autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). These are applied to Swedish electricity consumption data, with the aim of deriving simple yet efficient predictors. An additional aim is to analyse the impact of day of week and temperature on forecast accuracy. The models are evaluated on both long- and mid-term forecasting horizons, ranging from one day to one month. The results show that neural networks are superior for this task, although stochastic seasonal ARMA models also perform quite well. Including external variables only marginally improved the ARMA predictions, and had somewhat unclear effects on the RNN forecasting accuracy. Depending on the network model used, adding external variables had either a slightly positive or slightly negative impact on prediction accuracy.