Adaptive Modularized Recurrent Neural Networks for Electric Load Forecasting

In order to provide more efficient and reliable power services than the traditional grid, it is necessary for the smart grid to accurately predict the electric load. Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have attracted increasing attention in this task because it can discover the temporal correlation between current load data and those long-ago through the self-connection of the hidden layer. Unfortunately, the traditional RNN is prone to the vanishing or exploding gradient problem with the increase of memory depth, which leads to the degradation of predictive accuracy. Many RNN architectures address this problem at the expense of complex internal structures and increased network parameters. Motivated by this, this article proposes two adaptive modularized RNNs to tackle the challenge, which can not only solve the gradient problem effectively with a simple architecture, but also achieve better performance with fewer parameters than other popular RNNs.