Research on Load Forecasting Prediction Model Based on Modified Sand Cat Swarm Optimization and SelfAttention TCN

The core structure of modern power systems reflects a fundamental symmetry between electricity supply and demand, and accurate load forecasting is essential for maintaining this dynamic balance. To improve the accuracy of short-term load forecasting in power systems, this paper proposes a novel model that combines a Multi-Strategy Improved Sand Cat Swarm Optimization algorithm (MSCSO) with a Self-Attention Temporal Convolutional Network (SA TCN). The model constructs efficient input features through data denoising, correlation filtering, and dimensionality reduction using UMAP. MSCSO integrates Uniform Tent Chaos Mapping, a sensitivity enhancement mechanism, and Lévy flight to optimize key parameters of the SA TCN, ensuring symmetrical exploration and stable convergence in the solution space. The self-attention mechanism exhibits structural symmetry when processing each position in the input sequence and does not rely on fixed positional order, enabling the model to more effectively capture long-term dependencies and preserve the symmetry of the sequence structure—demonstrating its advantage in symmetry-based modeling. Experimental results on historical load data from Panama show that the proposed model achieves excellent forecasting accuracy (RMSE = 24.7072, MAE = 17.5225, R2 = 0.9830), highlighting its innovation and applicability in symmetrical system environments.