AMTCN: An Attention-Based Multivariate Temporal Convolutional Network for Electricity Consumption Prediction

Accurate prediction of electricity consumption is crucial for energy management and allocation. This study introduces a novel approach, named Attention-based Multivariate Temporal Convolutional Network (AMTCN), for electricity consumption forecasting by integrating attention mechanisms with multivariate temporal convolutional networks. The method involves feature extraction from diverse time series of different feature variables using dilated convolutional networks. Subsequently, attention mechanisms are employed to capture the correlation and contextually important information among various features, thereby enhancing the model’s predictive accuracy. The AMTCN method exhibits universality, making it applicable to various prediction tasks in different scenarios. Experimental evaluations are conducted on four distinct datasets, encompassing electricity consumption and weather temperature aspects. Comparative experiments with LSTM, ConvLSTM, GRU, and TCN—widely-used deep learning methods—demonstrate that our AMTCN model achieves significant improvements of 57% in MSE, 37% in MAE, 35% in RRSE, and 12% in CORR metrics, respectively. This research contributes a promising approach to accurate electricity consumption prediction, leveraging the synergy of attention mechanisms and multivariate temporal convolutional networks, with broad applicability in diverse forecasting scenarios.