A Flow-Based Model for Conditional and Probabilistic Electricity Consumption Profile Generation and Prediction

Residential Load Profile (RLP) generation and prediction are critical for the operation and planning of distribution networks, particularly as diverse low-carbon technologies are increasingly integrated. This paper introduces a novel flow-based generative model, termed Full Convolutional Profile Flow (FCPFlow), which is uniquely designed for both conditional and unconditional RLP generation, and for probabilistic load forecasting. By introducing two new layers--the invertible linear layer and the invertible normalization layer--the proposed FCPFlow architecture shows three main advantages compared to traditional statistical and contemporary deep generative models: 1) it is well-suited for RLP generation under continuous conditions, such as varying weather and annual electricity consumption, 2) it shows superior scalability in different datasets compared to traditional statistical models, and 3) it also demonstrates better modeling capabilities in capturing the complex correlation of RLPs compared with deep generative models.