Improving trustworthiness of data-driven power grid contingency analysis with Bayesian residual graph neural networks

Abstract The evolving energy landscape requires novel tools to efficiently perform contingency analysis and reliability assessment of power grids, potentially in real-time. The high computational cost of traditional power flow solvers limits their applicability in practice. Machine learning surrogates such as Deep Neural Networks (NNs) accelerate power flow solvers computations, enabling high order contingency analysis and real-time decision making by learning highly nonlinear functions and integrating grid topology via graph architectures. However, (graph) NNs lack predictive power away from training data, and do not provide predictive confidence estimates. We present a Bayesian residual graph NN that integrates knowledge from low-fidelity data via residual training and embeds granular quantification of uncertainties, improving trustworthiness critical for high-consequence decision-making. Applying Bayesian concepts to NNs is challenging due to the high-dimensionality of both the parameter space, complicating derivation of a meaningful prior, and the output space in large grid systems, requiring enhanced techniques to assess the predicted high-dimensional uncertainties. Our contributions include: (1) Deriving a prior for fully-connected and graph NNs that leverages low-fidelity data to guide mean predictions and appropriately control prior predictive uncertainty. (2) Integrating this prior within an ensembling with anchoring scheme for efficient approximate posterior inference. (3) Deriving enhanced metrics to assess accuracy of both the mean and uncertainty predictions in high dimensions, appropriately accounting for correlations propagated through graph layers. The resulting Bayesian residual graph NN is tested on a contingency analysis task for a 14-bus and 118-bus grids.