A hybrid robust system considering outliers for electric load series forecasting

Electric load forecasting has become crucial to the safe operation of power grids and cost reduction in the production of power. Although numerous electric load forecasting models have been proposed, most of them are still limited by poor effectiveness in the model training and a sensitivity to outliers. The limitations of current methods may lead to extra operational costs of a power system or even disrupt its power distribution and network safety. To this end, we propose a new hybrid load-forecasting model, which is based on a robust extreme-learning machine and an improved whale optimization algorithm. Specifically, Huber loss, which is insensitive to outliers, is proposed as the objective function in extreme learning machine (ELM) training. In addition, an improved whale optimization algorithm is designed for the robust ELM training, in which a cellular automaton mechanism is used to enhance the local search. To verify our improved whale optimization algorithm, some experiments were then conducted based on seven benchmark test functions. Due to the enhancement of the local search, the improved optimizer was around 7% superior to the basic. Finally, our proposed hybrid forecasting model was validated by two real electric load datasets (Nanjing and New South Wales), and the experimental results confirmed that the proposed hybrid load-forecasting model could achieve satisfying improvements in both datasets.