Multiple Kernel Learning-Based Transfer Regression for Electric Load Forecasting

Electric load forecasting, especially short-term load forecasting (STLF), is becoming more and more important for power system operation. We propose to use multiple kernel learning (MKL) for residential electric load forecasting which provides more flexibility than traditional kernel methods. Computation time is an important issue for short-term forecasting, especially for energy scheduling. However, conventional MKL methods usually lead to complicated optimization problems. Another practical issue for this application is that there may be a very limited amount of data available to train a reliable forecasting model for a new house, while at the same time we may have historical data collected from other houses which can be leveraged to improve the prediction performance for the new house. In this paper, we propose a boosting-based framework for MKL regression to deal with the aforementioned issues for STLF. In particular, we first adopt boosting to learn an ensemble of multiple kernel regressors and then extend this framework to the context of transfer learning. Furthermore, we consider two different settings: homogeneous transfer learning and heterogeneous transfer learning. Experimental results on residential data sets demonstrate that forecasting error can be reduced by a large margin with the knowledge learned from other houses.