Evaluating machine learning algorithms for energy consumption prediction in electric vehicles: A comparative study

An accurate energy consumption prediction becomes crucial with increasing electric vehicle usage for effective power grid management. This research examined the performance of eleven machine learning models for this purpose: Ridge Regression, Lasso Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors, Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Regression, Multi-Layer Perceptron, XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM, Gaussian Processes for Regression(GPR) and Extra Trees Regressor, considering real historical data from Colorado. The models were evaluated using different metrics: Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), R², Root Mean Squared Error(RMSE) and Normalized Root Mean Squared Error(NRMSE), with visual analyses through scatter plots and time series plots. The best model observed was the Extra Trees Regressor, which had an MAE of 0.5888, an MSE of 3.2683, R² value of 0.9592, RMSE of 1.8078 and NRMSE of 0.020. Gradient Boosting and KNN also returned good results, although they were slightly more dispersed. Nevertheless, while non-linear models like MLP, XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM and linear models such as Ridge and Lasso Regression offer valuable insights, they exhibit shortcomings in estimating energy, especially at extreme levels, highlighting limitations in capturing complex non-linear interactions. This study focuses on their applicability to energy projections to demonstrate how well ensemble and non-linear models may capture intricate patterns in time series. These cutting-edge machine learning techniques might greatly enhance energy demand predictions.