Robust-mv-M-LSTM-CI: Robust Energy Consumption Forecasting in Commercial Buildings during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The digitalization of the global landscape of electricity consumption, combined with the impact of the pandemic and the implementation of lockdown measures, has required the development of a precise forecast of energy consumption to optimize the management of energy resources, particularly in pandemic contexts. To address this, this research introduces a novel forecasting model, the robust multivariate multilayered long- and short-term memory model with knowledge injection (Robust-mv-M-LSTM-CI), to improve the accuracy of forecasting models under uncertain conditions. This innovative model extends the capabilities of mv-M-LSTM-CI by incorporating an additional branch to extract energy consumption from adversarial noise. The experiment results show that Robust-mv-M-LSTM-CI demonstrates substantial improvements over mv-M-LSTM-CI and other models with adversarial training: multivariate multilayered long short-term memory (adv-M-LSTM), long short-term memory (adv-LSTM), bidirectional long short-term memory (adv-Bi-LSTM), and linear regression (adv-LR). The maximum noise level from the adversarial examples is 0.005. On average, across three datasets, the proposed model improves about 24.01% in mean percentage absolute error (MPAE), 18.43% in normalized root mean square error (NRMSE), and 8.53% in R2 over mv-M-LSTM-CI. In addition, the proposed model outperforms “adv-” models with MPAE improvements ranging from 35.74% to 89.80% across the datasets. In terms of NRMSE, improvements range from 36.76% to 80.00%. Furthermore, Robust-mv-M-LSTM-CI achieves remarkable improvements in the R2 score, ranging from 17.35% to 119.63%. The results indicate that the proposed model enhances overall accuracy while effectively mitigating the potential reduction in accuracy often associated with adversarial training models. By incorporating adversarial noise and COVID-19 case data, the proposed model demonstrates improved accuracy and robustness in forecasting energy consumption under uncertain conditions. This enhanced predictive capability will enable energy managers and policymakers to better anticipate and respond to fluctuations in energy demand during pandemics, ensuring more resilient and efficient energy systems.