Energy Consumption Forecasting for Smart Meters Using Extreme Learning Machine Ensemble

The employment of smart meters for energy consumption monitoring is essential for planning and management of power generation systems. In this context, forecasting energy consumption is a valuable asset for decision making, since it can improve the predictability of forthcoming demand to energy providers. In this work, we propose a data-driven ensemble that combines five single well-known models in the forecasting literature: a statistical linear autoregressive model and four artificial neural networks: (radial basis function, multilayer perceptron, extreme learning machines, and echo state networks). The proposed ensemble employs extreme learning machines as the combination model due to its simplicity, learning speed, and greater ability of generalization in comparison to other artificial neural networks. The experiments were conducted on real consumption data collected from a smart meter in a one-step-ahead forecasting scenario. The results using five different performance metrics demonstrate that our solution outperforms other statistical, machine learning, and ensembles models proposed in the literature.