Analysis of the Impact of Clustering Techniques and Parameters on Evolutionary-Based Hybrid Models for Forecasting Electricity Consumption

Electricity is undeniably one of the most crucial building blocks of high-quality life all over the world. Like many other African countries, Nigeria is still grappling with the challenge of the energy crisis. However, accurate prediction of electricity consumption is vital for the operation of electric utility companies and policymakers. In response, this study underlines the application of hybrid modelling techniques for the accurate prediction of electricity consumption, using Lagos districts, Nigeria, as a case study. To begin with, this research investigates the performance of three evolutionary algorithms - Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Differential Evolution (DE) - to optimize the parameters of adaptive network-based fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS). In addition, the impact of renowned clustering techniques such as grid partitioning (GP), fuzzy c-means (FCM), and subtractive clustering (SC) on other pivotal key hyperparameters of the ANFIS was examined and analyzed. Furthermore, the robustness of the optimal sub-model was evaluated by comparing it with other hybrid models that are based on six different variants of PSO. The efficacy of the proposed model was evaluated using four standard statistical measures. Finally, the results showed that the combination of the ANFIS approach and PSO under an SC approach and clustering radius of 0.6 delivered the best forecast scheme with the highest accuracy of the MAPE (8.8418%), the MAE (872.1784), the CVRMSE (10.7895), and the RMSE (1.0945E+03). The simulation results were analyzed and compared to other approaches, revealing that the suggested model is better.