Transfer Learning in Transformer-Based Demand Forecasting For Home Energy Management System

Abstract: Increasingly, homeowners opt for photovoltaic (PV) systems and/or battery storage to minimize their energy bills and maximize renewable energy usage. This has spurred the development of advanced control algorithms that maximally achieve those goals. However, a common challenge faced while developing such controllers is the unavailability of accurate forecasts of household power consumption, especially for shorter time resolutions (15 minutes) and in a data-efficient manner. In this paper, we analyze how transfer learning can help by exploiting data from multiple households to improve a single house's load forecasting. Specifically, we train an advanced forecasting model (a temporal fusion transformer) using data from multiple different households, and then finetune this global model on a new household with limited data (i.e. only a few days). The obtained models are used for forecasting power consumption of the household for the next 24 hours~(day-ahead) at a time resolution of 15 minutes, with the intention of using these forecasts in advanced controllers such as Model Predictive Control. We show the benefit of this transfer learning setup versus solely using the individual new household's data, both in terms of (i) forecasting accuracy ($\sim$15\% MAE reduction) and (ii) control performance ($\sim$2\% energy cost reduction), using real-world household data.