Leveraging socioeconomic information and deep learning for residential load pattern prediction

Advanced metering infrastructure systems record a high volume of residential load data, opening up an opportunity for utilities to understand consumer energy consumption behaviors. Existing studies have focused on load profiling and prediction, but neglected the role of socioeconomic characteristics of consumers in their energy consumption behaviors. In this paper, we develop a prediction model using deep neural networks to predict load patterns of consumers based on their socioeconomic information. We analyze load patterns using the K-means clustering method and use an entropy-based feature selection method to select the key socioeconomic characteristics that affect consumers' load patterns. Our prediction method with feature selection achieves a higher prediction accuracy compared with the benchmark schemes, e.g. 80% reduction in the prediction error.