Short-Term Building Electrical Energy Consumption Forecasting by Employing Gene Expression Programming and GMDH Networks

Over the past decade, energy forecasting applications not only on the grid side of electric power systems but also on the customer side for load and demand prediction purposes have become ubiquitous after the advancements in the smart grid technologies. Within this context, short-term electrical energy consumption forecasting is a requisite for energy management and planning of all buildings from households and residences in the small-scale to huge building complexes in the large-scale. Today’s popular machine learning algorithms in the literature are commonly used to forecast short-term building electrical energy consumption by generating an abstruse analytical expression between explanatory variables and response variables. In this study, gene expression programming (GEP) and group method of data handling (GMDH) networks are meticulously employed for creating genuine and easily understandable mathematical models among predictor variables and target variables and forecasting short-term electrical energy consumption, belonging to a large hospital complex situated in the Eastern Mediterranean. Consequently, acquired results yielded mean absolute percentage errors of 0.620% for GMDH networks and 0.641% for GEP models, which reveal that the forecasting process can be accomplished and formulated simultaneously via proposed algorithms without the need of applying feature selection methods.