Electricity Consumption Forecasting: An Approach Using Cooperative Ensemble Learning with SHapley Additive exPlanations
For university administrators, this provides a practical forecasting tool to manage electricity expenses and environmental impact, though the approach is incremental and domain-specific.
The paper tackles electricity consumption forecasting for university campuses using a cooperative ensemble learning approach (WSB) that combines LSTM, RF, SVR, and XGBoost with SHAP-based feature selection and hyperparameter optimization. The method achieved sMAPE of 13.90% and 18.72% on two campuses, outperforming individual models.
Electricity expense management presents significant challenges, as this resource is susceptible to various influencing factors. In universities, the demand for this resource is rapidly growing with institutional expansion and has a significant environmental impact. In this study, the machine learning models long short-term memory (LSTM), random forest (RF), support vector regression (SVR), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) were trained with historical consumption data from the Federal Institute of Paraná (IFPR) over the last seven years and climatic variables to forecast electricity consumption 12 months ahead. Datasets from two campuses were adopted. To improve model performance, feature selection was performed using Shapley additive explanations (SHAP), and hyperparameter optimization was carried out using genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The results indicate that the proposed cooperative ensemble learning approach named Weaker Separator Booster (WSB) exhibited the best performance for datasets. Specifically, it achieved an sMAPE of 13.90% and MAE of 1990.87 kWh for the IFPR-Palmas Campus and an sMAPE of 18.72% and MAE of 465.02 kWh for the Coronel Vivida Campus. The SHAP analysis revealed distinct feature importance patterns across the two IFPR campuses. A commonality that emerged was the strong influence of lagged time-series values and a minimal influence of climatic variables.