The effect of electricity consumption determinants in household load forecasting models

Abstract Usually, household electricity consumption fluctuates, often driven by several electrical consumption determinants such as income, household size, and price. Recently, research studies on the investigation of predictor variables in household electricity consumption have increased especially in the developing and newly industrialized countries. However, the studies just focus on identifying the predictor variables of household electricity consumption that influence load forecasting models. In Tanzania, for instance, scholars found that using the “income” determinant improves the performance of a forecasting model. The scholars suggest without any empirical bases that adding more predictor variables would have improved the accuracy of the model. This study aims to analyze the effect of the number of predictor variables on household load forecasting performance based on Tanzania’s data. Nonlinear regression based on a Weibull function and multivariate adaptive regression splines approaches are used for this purpose. Our findings indicate that income, household size, and number of appliances are common predictor variables of household consumption in developing countries. The measured forecasting root-mean-square error (RMSE) when using income, household size, and the number of appliances is 0.8244, 1.2314, and 0.9868, respectively. Finally, we forecasted load using all three determinants and the RMSE dropped to 0.7031. Having obtained the smaller value of RMSE when all predictors are used reveals that the inclusion of all three predictor variables in load forecasting leads to a significant decrease in RMSE by 14.73%. Therefore, the study recommends using multiple predictor variables in load forecasting models to increase accuracy.