A new method to forecast multi-time scale load of natural gas based on augmentation data-machine learning model

Gas load forecasting is important for the economic and reliable operation of the city gas transmission and distribution system. In this paper, a nonlinear autoregressive model (NARX) with exogenous inputs, support vector machine (SVM), Gaussian process regression (GPR) and ensemble tree model (ETREE) were used to predict and compare the gas load based on the gas load data in a certain region for past 3 years. The results showed that the prediction errors for most of days were higher than 10%. Further, simulation data were generated by considering the gas load variation trend, which was then combined with historical data to form the augmentation data set to train the model. The test results indicated that the prediction error of daily gas load in one year reduced to below 7% with a machine learning prediction method based on augmentation data. In addition, the model based on augmentation data set still performed better than original data in predicting the monthly gas load in last year as well as daily gas load in last month and week. Therefore, the method based on augmentation data proposed in this paper is a potentially good tool to forecast natural gas load.