摘要
Electric load forecasting has been a major area of research in the last decade since the production of accurate short-term forecasts for electricity loads has proven to be a key to success for many of the decision makers in the energy sector, from power generation to operation of the system. The objective of this research is to analyze the capacity of the MLP （multilayer perceptron neural network） versus SOM （self-organizing map neural network） for short-term load forecasting. The MLP is one of the most commonly used networks. It can be used for classification problems, model construction, series forecasting and discrete control. On the other hand, the SOM is a type of artificial neural network that is trained using unsupervised data to produce a low-dimensional, discretized representation of an input space of training samples in a cell map. Historical data of real global load demand were used for the research. Both neural models provide good prediction results, but the results obtained with the SOM maps are markedly better Also the main advantage of SOM maps is that they reach good results as a network unsupervised. It is much easier to train and interpret the results.
