As short-term load forecasting is essential for the day-to-day operation planning of power systems, we built an ensemble learning model to perform such forecasting for Thai data. The proposed model uses voting regression (VR), producing forecasts with weighted averages of forecasts from five individual models: three parametric multiple linear regressors and two non-parametric machine-learning models. The regressors are linear regression models with gradient-descent (LR), ordinary least-squares (OLS) estimators, and generalized least-squares auto-regression (GLSAR) models. In contrast, the machine-learning models are decision trees (DT) and random forests (RF). To select the best model variables and hyper-parameters, we used cross-validation (CV) performance instead of the test data performance, which yielded overly good test performance. We compared various validation schemes and found that the Blocked-CV scheme gives the validation error closest to the test error. Using Blocked-CV, the test results show that the VR model outperforms all its individual predictors.

Seksan Laitrakun, Somrudee Deepaisarn, Sarun Gulyanon, Chayud Srisumarnk, Nattapol Chiewnawintawat, Angkoon Angkoonsawaengsuk, Pakorn Opaprakasit, Jirawan Jindakaew, and Narisara Jaikaew. Journal of information and communication convergence engineering 2023;21:208-15. https://doi.org/10.56977/jicce.2023.21.3.208

Human activity recognition (HAR) has been applied to several advanced applications, especially when individuals may need to be monitored closely. This work focuses on HAR using wearable sensors attached to various locations of the user body. The data from each sensor may provide unequally discriminative information and, then, an effective fusion method is needed. In order to address this issue, inspired by the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) mechanism, we propose the merging-squeeze-excitation (MSE) feature fusion which emphasizes informative feature maps and suppresses ambiguous feature maps during fusion. The MSE feature fusion consists of three steps: pre-merging, squeeze-and-excitation, and post-merging. Unlike the SE mechanism, the set of feature maps from each branch will be recalibrated by using the channel weights also computed from the pre-merged feature maps. The calibrated feature maps from all branches are merged to obtain a set of channel-weighted and merged feature maps which will be used in the classification process. Additionally, a set of MSE feature fusion extensions is presented. In these proposed methods, three deep-learning models (LeNet5, AlexNet, and VGG16) are used as feature extractors and four merging methods (addition, maximum, minimum, and average) are applied as merging operations. The performances of the proposed methods are evaluated by classifying popular public datasets.

We consider the composite hypothesis testing problem of time-bandwidth-constrained distributed detection. In this scenario, the probability distribution of the observed signal when the event of interest is happening is unknown. In addition, local decisions are censored and only those uncensored local decisions will be sent to the fusion center over a shared and noisy collision channel. The fusion center also has a limited time duration to collect transmitted decisions and make a final decision. Two types of medium access control that the sensor nodes apply to send their decisions are investigated: time division multiple access and slotted-Aloha. Unlike using the time division multiple access protocol, the slotted-Aloha-based distributed detection will experience packet collisions. However, in this article, since only uncensored decisions are sent, packet collisions are informative. We derive fusion rules according to generalized likelihood ratio test, Rao test, and Wald test for both the time division multiple access–based distributed detection and the slotted-Aloha-based distributed detection. We see that the fusion rules for the slotted-Aloha-based distributed detection here also exploit packet collisions in the final decision-making. In addition, the asymptotic performances and energy consumption of both schemes are analyzed. Extensive simulation and numerical results are provided to compare the performances of these two schemes. We show that, for a given time delay, the slotted-Aloha-based distributed detection can outperform the time division multiple access–based distributed detection by increasing the number of sensor nodes which results in higher energy consumption.

Thailand Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) has 19.36 million residential customers and approximately 73% of them have late or unpaid electricity payments. This causes several problems including reduction of PEA’s income. Therefore, we aim to classify and find data mining algorithms to predict classes of electricity payment behaviors of residential customers in order to improve customer service and to reduce the number of late or unpaid payment of electrical bills. In this work, the data set consists of payment behaviors and demographic characteristics of customers, which are gathered from 1,079 customers. The prediction process is divided into two main parts: clustering classes of customers by using k-means algorithm, and using data mining algorithms for customer model prediction. We performed experiments using five data mining algorithms: logistic regression, decision tree, random fores, support vector machine (SVM) and XGBoost. Our results show that the random forest algorithm is a good choice for this predictive classes of customers to develop appropriate strategies to increase satisfaction of customers and revenue of PEA.