2009 International Conference on Energy and Environment Technology

Medium and Long-Term Load Forecasting Based on PCA and BP Neural Network
Method

Shi Zhang Dingwei Wang

Institute of Systems Engineering, College of Institute of Systems Engineering, College of
Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern
University University
Shenyang, China Shenyang, China
E-mail: zhangshi2001@163.com E-mail: dwwang@mail.neu.edu.cn

Abstract—To settle the problem which the precision and

genera-lization performance of forecast model is affected easily
by input variable, the method which reconstructs the original
input space of back-propagation neural network by principal
component analysis that can eliminate the relevance of value is
researched. The method can not only reduce duplicated
information but also extract the leading factors. Its can also
optimize its network structure as well as enhance the
network’s forecast precision. The effectiveness of the proposed
algorithm is verified by the practical data.
Keywords-principal component analysis; back-propagation
neural network(BPNN); load forecasting; power system
I. INTRODUCTION
Medium and long-term load forecasting of power system
is considered as an important basis for the work of the
depart-ment such as power system programming, planning,
market transactions, scheduling etc[1]. Scientific forecast can
ensure current result and current and it is very important to
forecast currently and reasonably to electricity demand for
stable operation of power system. Medium and long-term
load fore-casting which is easily affected by economic,
policy, industrial and many other factors is a typical non-
linear system[2,4]. Artificial neural network algorithm has
achieved satisfactory results and actual outcome to non-
linear system and was used to power load forecasting by
scholars at home and abroad[5-9].
Back-propagation neural network is used to predict the
following year electricity load of a certain city in which load
data and economic data of whole society can be acquired.
However, the generalization performance of the network is
reduced due to high dimension and serious relevance of the
network, resulting in decreased prediction accuracy. The
characteristics of principal component analysis method
which can eliminate correlation between variables is used to
analyze the principal component relations of observational
data, which not only reduces the dimension of variables, but
also retain the original information[10,11]. The method can
optimize network structure as well as enhance generalization
ability of network. The effectiveness of the proposed
algorithm is verified by the practical data.
II. PRINCIPLE OF PCA
The operation object of PCA, sample data matrix of
process variables, are recombined and extracted a small
amount of the number of the integrated variables which can
be summed up most of information of the original data
matrix[12].
The data compression of principal component analysis
method is essentially the spectral decomposition process of
the covariance matrix of data matrix X. X is a standardized
data matrix, X ∈ R n×m , where n is sampling frequency of data
and m is the number of variables.
XT X (1)
Cov( X ) =
n −1
The spectral decomposition can be determined by the
following equation:
X = t1 p1T + t2 p2T + " t k pkT + E (2)
Where, ti is principal component and pi is load vector and E
is covariance matrix.
The following formula will be determined when formula
(2) is multiplied by pi .
ti = X p i (3)
If the score vector is arranged according to below length:
t1 > t2 > " > tm (4)
Then load vector p1 represents the biggest change direction
of the data matrix X and pm represents the smallest change
direction of the data matrix X. The change of matrix X is
mainly manifested by the forefront sever load vector. The
final small load vector that is caused by noise might be
written by the residual matrix and neglected to reduce noise
effect. Therefore, the thumb rule which judges accumulation
contribution factor of the first k principal components
whether to be bigger than 85% is used to determinate
reasonably to the number of the principal component.
Empirical formula can be determined by the equation (5).
k m
∑λ ∑λ i i > 85% (5)
i =1 i =1

The research was partly support by the National Natural Science

Found- ation of China(No. 70171021)

978-0-7695-3819-8/09 $26.00 © 2009 IEEE 389

DOI 10.1109/ICEET.2009.559
 III. PCA-BPNN FORECAST MODEL AND
EXAMPLE APPLICATION
The basic philosophy of PCA algorithm is that the high
space which is composed of a lot of load data is projected to
low dimension model space which is constituted of a few
independent new variables that is a linear combination of the
original load data to compress the dimension of forecast data
and extract principal feature component. These very few
new variables can summarize behavioral trait of overall
system. Therefore, PCA of forecast load data is very
meaningful. The combination forecast model used in this
paper is shown in figure 1.

Load data BPNN1

PCA BPNN2 Return of Load

PCA forcast data

BPNNn

Figure 1. Combination forecast model

A. Annual Electricity Demand Forecast
Whether a factor affects the electricity demand or not
depends on the length of the predicting term. If hourly
demand is to be predicted, the weather conditions including
temperature, humidity, and so on[13-15], should be mainly
considered. But, if monthly or annual demand is to be
predicted, some important economical indices should be
considered. If the predicting term is even longer, some
political factors should also be taken into account[16].
This paper takes electricity consumption of a certain
urban as the example to forecast its electricity demand. The
factors affecting annual electricity demand of a city are as
follows: the gross products of the nation Pn, the gross
products of the primary, secondary and tertiary industry Pp,
Ps, Pt and the total population P.
The annual electricity demands can also be considered
as a time series. As a result, the electricity demand of the
previous years is also considered as the affecting factors of
annual electricity demand L. The primary data is shown
table 1.

TABLE I. PRIMARY DATA

Year Pn Pp Ps Pt P L

1995 7.82

1996 71.96 13.32 35.61 23.05 67.08 8.05

1997 78.63 14.05 39.36 25.22 67.51 8.27

1998 84.50 12.01 42.87 29.62 67.94 8.72

1999 89.55 12.59 44.64 32.32 68.05 9.39

2000 97.65 12.82 48.02 36.82 67.92 9.59

2001 103.30 12.94 49.72 40.66 67.78 10.43

2002 112.80 13.42 54.32 45.03 67.93 11.71

2003 122.10 13.68 60.36 49.05 67.92 13.39

2004 134.30 13.34 66.46 54.51 68.11 15.60

2005 160.40 14.91 79.70 65.75 68.01 17.66

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B. PCA Optimization of Network principal component analysis that can eliminate relevance of
The electricity consumed L and all the factors are firstly value is researched. The method can not only reduce
unified to the range of [-1, 1] respectively and the plot of duplicated information but also extract the leading factors.
score by PCA is shown in figure 2. The score of 5th and 6th Its can also optimize its net work structure as well as
principal components had already achieved 95.97%, has enhance the network’s forecast precision. After actual load
conformed to the formula(5). Therefore, the 5th, 6th principal forecast experiment, the load forecast method based on
components may replace the original forecast matrix to take PCA-BPNN is applicable in question of relevant variable
the input neuron of the neural network, has realized considerable like load forecasting of power system.
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