Residential electricity consumption represents a large percentage of overall energy use. Therefore, accurately predicting residential electricity consumption and understanding the factors that influence it can provide effective strategies for reducing energy demand. In this study, a dendritic neural network-based model (DNM), combined with the AdaMax optimization algorithm, is used to predict residential electricity consumption. The case study uses the U.S. residential electricity consumption dataset.This paper constructs a feature selection framework for the dataset, reducing the high-dimensional data to 12 features. The DNM model is then used for fitting and compared with five commonly used prediction models. The of DNM is 0.7405, the highest among the six models, followed by the XGBoost model with an of 0.7286. Subsequently, the paper leverages the interpretability of DNM to further filter the data, obtaining a dataset with 6 features, and the on this dataset is further improved to 0.7423, resulting in an increase of 0.0018.