Interpretable Kolmogorov-Arnold network with feature-isolated temporal attention mechanism for electricity load forecasting

Accurate electricity load forecasting is a crucial prerequisite for stable power system operations. While prevalent deep learning models present competitive performance, they often operate as black boxes and lack interpretability. However, such capability has increasingly become a key enabler to understand the influences of forecast drivers, thereby assisting more informed system operations. While the Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN) has emerged as a promising alternative because of its learnable activation function design, its direct application to time-series forecasting faces challenges in modeling complex temporal data patterns. Also, simple integration into existing architectures, such as serving as replacement for neural modules, cannot fully leverage KAN’s interpretability strengths. To address these gaps, this study develops LoadKAN, a novel hybrid and interpretable framework for load forecasting that synergistically combines a specifically-designed feature-isolated temporal attention mechanism with a KAN module. The attention stage aims to extract temporal dynamics from each input feature independently, such as historical load and human mobility, providing distilled feature representations to the KAN module for interpretable predictions. When evaluated on datasets from three representative U.S. electricity markets, our LoadKAN remains highly competitive when compared to extensively-tuned, state-of-the-art, black-box deep learning benchmarks. More importantly, LoadKAN’s interpretability enables a granular analysis of the learned non-linear relationships between six distinct mobility patterns and electricity load. Through KAN-learned activation functions, our quantitative sensitivity analyses on mobility features reveal complex and market-specific dependencies. These findings further demonstrate the ability of our LoadKAN to generate insights often obscured by opaque black-box neural forecasting models.