Enhanced Short-Term Load Forecasting Based on Adaptive Residual Fusion of Autoformer and Transformer

Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting (STELF) is essential for grid scheduling and low-carbon smart grids. However, load exhibits multi-timescale periodicity and non-stationary fluctuations, making STELF highly challenging for existing models. To address this challenge, an Autoformer–Transformer residual fusion network (ATRFN) is proposed in this paper. A dynamic weighting mechanism is applied to combine the outputs of Autoformer and Transformer through residual connections. In this way, lightweight result-level fusion is enabled without modifications to either architecture. In experimental validations on real-world load datasets, the proposed ATRFN model achieves notable performance gains over single STELF models. For univariate STELF, the ATRFN model reduces forecasting errors by 11.94% in mean squared error (MSE), 10.51% in mean absolute error (MAE), and 7.99% in mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) compared with the best single model. In multivariate experiments, it further decreases errors by at least 5.22% in MSE, 2.77% in MAE, and 2.85% in MAPE, demonstrating consistent improvements in predictive accuracy.