Causal-Enhanced LSTM-RF: Early Warning of Dynamic Overload Risk for Distribution Transformers

The frequency of extreme weather events has become higher, and electricity consumption has also become more complex. These changes increase the risk of overload in distribution transformers (DTs), and this risk threatens the stability and reliability of the power grid. Existing methods have significant limitations. Traditional static threshold methods (based on DGA gas ratios and electrical signal thresholds) fail to consider temporal changes and complex links between factors, while modern machine learning models lack cause–effect relationships over time and clear ways to describe uncertainty. With such motivations, this paper proposes a causal-enhanced hybrid framework, which combines Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and Random Forest (RF) algorithms. The framework uses causal Seasonal Trend decomposition using Loess (STL) to reveal load patterns at different time scales. The mutual information index and spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) are used to explore nonlinear relations and reveal how temperature affects load changes. The LSTM model captures time dependence in load series, and the Bayesian optimized Random Forest is used to solve the problem of data imbalance and quantify uncertainty. In addition, the framework constructs an early warning system that combines data from many sources in real time. Test results show that the proposed algorithm exhibits excellent performance in multi-source data environments.