HydroFlow: Towards probabilistic electricity demand prediction using variational autoregressive models and normalizing flows

We present HydroFlow, a novel deep generative model for predicting the electricity generation demand of large-scale hydropower stations. HydroFlow uses a latent stochastic recurrent neural network to capture the dependencies in the multivariate time series. It not only utilizes the hidden state of the neural network, but also considers the uncertainty of variables related to natural and social factors. We also introduce an end-to-end approach based on generative flows to approximate the posterior distribution of time series with exact likelihoods. Our model is powerful as adding stochasticity to different factors (e.g., reservoir capacity and water-flow measurements) and thus overcomes the expressiveness limitations of deterministic prediction methods. It also enables trainable latent transformations that can improve the model interpretability. We evaluate HydroFlow on the data collected from the hydropower stations of a large-scale hydropower development company. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods while providing explainable results.