Hybrid Long Short-Term Memory Wavelet Transform Models for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting

To ensure the constant availability of electrical energy, power companies must consistently maintain a balance between supply and demand. However, electrical load is influenced by a variety of factors, necessitating the development of robust forecasting models. This study seeks to enhance electricity load forecasting by proposing a hybrid model that combines Sorted Coefficient Wavelet Decomposition with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. This approach offers significant advantages in reducing algorithmic complexity and effectively processing patterns within the same class of data. Various models, including Stacked LSTM, Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), Convolutional Neural Network—Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM), and Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM), were compared and optimized using grid search with cross-validation on consumption data from Lome, a city in Togo. The results indicate that the ConvLSTM model outperforms its counterparts based on Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and correlation coefficient (R2) metrics. The ConvLSTM model was further refined using wavelet decomposition with coefficient sorting, resulting in the WT+ConvLSTM model. This proposed approach significantly narrows the gap between actual and predicted loads, reducing discrepancies from 10–50 MW to 0.5–3 MW. In comparison, the WT+ConvLSTM model surpasses Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) type artificial neural networks, achieving a MAPE of 0.485%, an RMSE of 0.61 MW, and an R2 of 0.99. This approach demonstrates substantial robustness in electricity load forecasting, aiding stakeholders in the energy sector to make more informed decisions.