Power Grid Load Forecasting Using a CNN-LSTM Network Based on a Multi-Modal Attention Mechanism

Optimizing short-term load forecasting performance is a challenge due to the non-linearity and randomness of electrical load, as well as the variability of system operating patterns. Existing methods often fail to consider how to effectively combine their complementary advantages and fail to fully capture the internal information in the load sequence, leading to a decrease in accuracy. To achieve accurate and efficient short-term load forecasting, this study proposes a novel power grid load forecasting model that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs), Multi-Head Self-Attention Mechanism (MHSA), Global Attention Mechanism (GAM), and Channel Attention Mechanism (CAM) to achieve efficient and precise short-term load forecasting. This model aims to address the issue in traditional methods where complex temporal features and important information in power grid load data are not fully captured. Firstly, the CNN module is used to extract high-dimensional spatial features from the load data, and a pooling layer is applied to reduce dimensionality while retaining key information. Then, the Multi-Head Self-Attention mechanism is employed to model the long-range dependencies of the sequence data, enhancing the ability to extract temporal features. Next, the LSTM layer further captures the time dependencies in the load sequence. Subsequently, the Global Attention mechanism helps the model focus more on the most relevant parts of the input sequence, improving the model’s performance and generalization ability. The Channel Attention module is then applied to weight different feature channels, highlighting important information and reducing redundancy. Finally, the flattened output layer produces the forecast results. Experimental validation shows that the proposed CNN-MHSA-LSTM-GAM-CAM model outperforms existing mainstream methods in terms of load forecasting accuracy, providing effective support for the optimized scheduling of smart grids.