An analytical evaluation of Top-Down versus Bottom-Up forecast in the electricity demand

Demand and supply balancing is the key technology for power management and high-efficiency planning. As the smart metering device is getting popular in the Japan, USA and EU, the more data from smart meter can be collected for the better forecast. Forecast based on the Top-Down versus Bottom-Up was a long-term discussion for various fields. We performed a short-term power demand curve forecast based on Gradient boosting machine to compare the two methods. We found that there is very slight advantage of the bottom-up method in the demand forecast just based on the demand data.