Dynamic Cost Prediction for State Grid Engineering Projects Based on Multi-Source Business Data Fusion and Data-Driven Methods

Accurate dynamic cost prediction is essential for budget optimization and risk mitigation in State Grid projects. However, traditional models and even recent deep learning approaches fall short, as they treat cost drivers independently, adopt simplistic concatenation that destroys sourcewise structure, or fail to handle irregularly sampled and partially missing multi-source data. This paper proposes a novel data-driven framework that integrates multi-source business data through a hierarchical tensor fusion mechanism and a hybrid spatiotemporal architecture. The problem is formalized as multivariate time-series prediction with irregular sampling and missing modalities. The framework comprises three synergistic innovations: a differentiable low-rank CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition layer with adaptive attention weights that preserves cross-source structure while enabling compact dimensionality reduction; a spatiotemporal attention-based bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) that captures long-range temporal dependencies; and a graph convolutional network (GCN) that explicitly learns interrelations among cost drivers, a capability absent in most existing forecasting methods. The entire system is trained end to end with a customized loss combining mean squared error, quantile loss, and temporal consistency regularization. Extensive experiments on three State Grid substation projects demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 12.7–18.4% in MAPE and maintains robust performance with up to 40% of data missing. These results confirm that explicitly modeling both temporal evolution and driver interdependencies within a unified fusion framework is the key to reliable cost forecasting in large-scale infrastructure projects.