Efficient Residential Electric Load Forecasting via Transfer Learning and Graph Neural Networks

The accurate short-term electric load forecasting (STLF) is critical for the safety and economical operation of modern electric power systems. Recently, the graph neural network (GNN) has been applied in STLF and achieved impressive success via utilizing spatial dependency between residential households to improve STLF. However, GNN based forecasting models require a large amount of training data to learn reliable forecasting models. For a newly built residential neighbourhood, the historical electric load data might be insufficient for the training of GNNs. Meanwhile, we can learn GNN based models on other areas, referred to as the source domains, with abundant data. In this paper, we propose to reuse the knowledge learned on the source domains to assist the model learning for an area that only a limited amount of data is available, referred to as the target domain. Specifically, we propose an attentive transfer framework to ensemble the GNN models trained from source domains and the GNN model trained on the target domain. The proposed framework can dynamically assign weights to different GNN based models based on the input data. Extensive experiments have been conducted on real-world datasets and shown the effectiveness of the proposed framework on different scenarios.