Research on a Short-Term Power Load Forecasting Method Based on a Three-Channel LSTM-CNN

Aiming at addressing the problem of insufficient fusion of multi-source heterogeneous features in short-term power load forecasting, this paper proposes a three-channel LSTM-CNN hybrid forecasting model. This method extracts the temporal characteristics of time, weather, and historical loads through independent LSTM channels and realizes cross-modal spatial correlation mining by using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The time channel takes hour, week, and holiday codes as input to capture the daily/weekly cycle patterns. The meteorological channel integrates real-time data such as temperature and humidity and models the nonlinear delay effect between them and the load. The historical load channel sequence of the past 24 h is analyzed to interpret the internal trend and fluctuation characteristics. The output of the three channels is concatenated and then input into a one-dimensional convolutional layer. Cross-modal cooperative features are extracted through local perception. Finally, the 24 h load prediction value is output through the fully connected layer. The experimental results show that the prediction model based on the three-channel LSTM-CNN has a better prediction effect compared with the existing models, and its average absolute percentage error on the two datasets is reduced to 1.367% and 0.974%, respectively. The research results provide an expandable framework for multi-source time series data modeling, supporting the precise dispatching of smart grids and optimal energy allocation.