A Hybrid Autoencoder-Transformer Model for Robust Day-Ahead Electricity Price Forecasting under Extreme Conditions

Accurate day-ahead electricity price forecasting (DAEPF) is critical for the efficient operation of power systems. Extreme weather condition and market anomalies pose significant challenges to existing forecasting methods. To this end, this paper proposes a novel hybrid deep learning framework that integrates a Distilled Attention Transformer (DAT) model and an Autoencoder Self-regression (ASR) model. The DAT leverages a self-attention mechanism to dynamically assign higher weights to critical segments of historical data, effectively capturing both long-term trends and short-term fluctuations. Concurrently, the ASR employs unsupervised learning to detect and isolate anomalous patterns induced by extreme conditions, such as heavy rain, heat waves, or human festivals. Experiments on datasets sampled from California and Shandong Province demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in prediction accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. Our framework thus holds promise for enhancing grid resilience and optimizing market operations in future power systems.