Interactive Generalized Additive Model and Its Applications in Electric
  Load Forecasting
Linxiao Yang Rui Ren Xinyue Gu Liang Sun
Electric load forecasting is an indispensable component of electric power
system planning and management. Inaccurate load forecasting may lead to the
threat of outages or a waste of energy. Accurate electric load forecasting is
challenging when there is limited data or even no data, such as load
forecasting in holiday, or under extreme weather conditions. As high-stakes
decision-making usually follows after load forecasting, model interpretability
is crucial for the adoption of forecasting models. In this paper, we propose an
interactive GAM which is not only interpretable but also can incorporate
specific domain knowledge in electric power industry for improved performance.
This boosting-based GAM leverages piecewise linear functions and can be learned
through our efficient algorithm. In both public benchmark and electricity
datasets, our interactive GAM outperforms current state-of-the-art methods and
demonstrates good generalization ability in the cases of extreme weather
events. We launched a user-friendly web-based tool based on interactive GAM and
already incorporated it into our eForecaster product, a unified AI platform for
electricity forecasting.