Pandemic-Aware Electric Load Forecasting: A Multitask Bidirectional LSTM/CNN Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
COVID-19 pandemic has brought major uncertainty in load forecasting. Enforcing and relaxing lockdown rules, infection numbers, and the changing habits of people are the main causes of this uncertainty. Electric load forecasting maintains the balance between electric supply and demand. It also assists electric utilities in pricing their services, planning, and managing their infrastructure. This paper proposes two pandemic-aware load forecasting models (i) a city-level model, applied on the cities of Ottawa and Toronto, predicting hourly load using weather and pandemic-related features including population mobility and the number of daily COVID-19 infections, and (ii) a second open-source model forecasting quarter-hourly residential-level loads using weather and population mobility features for the city of Pune in India. Both models utilize multitask learning to jointly learn and predict future electric loads. The quarter-hourly model uses Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to learn from COVID’s specific features, and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to learn from the historical load data before the pandemic. The multitask nature of the model allows for incorporating multiple datasets with different numbers of features. The residential-level multitask model allowed for learning from long-term data before COVID-19 using weather features, short-term load data, and the mobility data. Multitask learning has also enabled the use of two datasets with different numbers of features due to the lack of mobility data pre-COVID.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".