Stride-TCN for Energy Consumption Forecasting and Its Optimization

Forecasting, commonly used in econometrics, meteorology, or energy consumption prediction, is the field of study that deals with time series data to predict future trends. Former studies have revealed that both traditional statistical models and recent deep learning-based approaches have achieved good performance in forecasting. In particular, temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) have proved their effectiveness in several time series benchmarks. However, presented TCN models are too heavy to deploy on resource-constrained systems, such as edge devices. As a resolution, this study proposes a stride-dilation mechanism for TCN that favors a lightweight model yet still achieves on-pair accuracy with the heavy counterparts. We also present the Chonnam National University (CNU) Electric Power Consumption dataset, the dataset of energy consumption measured at CNU by smart meters every hour. The experimental results indicate that our best model reduces the mean squared error by 32.7%, whereas the model size is only 1.6% compared to the baseline TCN.

Automated summary

This study proposes a lightweight temporal convolutional network (TCN) model for resource-constrained systems, which achieves the same accuracy as the heavy counterpart through a stride-dilation mechanism. Experimental results show that the model reduces the mean squared error by 32.7% compared to the baseline TCN.