Long-Term Electricity Demand Prediction Using Non-negative Tensor Factorization and Genetic Algorithm-Driven Temporal Modeling

Abstract

This study proposes a novel framework for long-term electricity demand prediction based solely on historical consumption data, without relying on external variables such as temperature or economic indicators. The method combines Non-negative Tensor Factorization (NTF) to extract low-dimensional temporal features from multi-way electricity usage data, with a Genetic Algorithm that optimizes the hyperparameters of time series models applied to the latent annual factors. We model the dataset as a third-order tensor spanning electric utilities, industrial sectors, and years, and apply canonical polyadic decomposition under non-negativity constraints. The annual component is forecasted using autoregressive models, with hyperparameter tuning guided by the prediction error or reconstruction accuracy on a validation set. Comparative experiments using real-world electricity data from Japan demonstrate that the proposed method achieves lower mean squared error than baseline approaches without tensor decomposition or evolutionary optimization. Moreover, we find that reducing the model's degrees of freedom via tensor decomposition improves generalization performance, and that initialization sensitivity in NTF can be mitigated through multiple runs or ensemble strategies. These findings suggest that the proposed framework offers an interpretable, flexible, and scalable approach to long-term electricity demand prediction and can be extended to other structured time series forecasting tasks.