Perceiving Unpredictability for New Energy Power and Electricity Consumption Forecasting

Accurate prediction of sensor network data in critical domains such as electric power systems and traffic planning is a core task for ensuring grid stability and enhancing urban operational efficiency. Although deep learning models have achieved significant architectural advancements, their training strategy implicitly assumes that all future events are equally predictable, ignoring that the future evolution of sensor signals intertwines deterministic patterns with stochastic events and that prediction difficulty increases with temporal distance. Forcing a model to fit inherently unpredictable events with a uniform supervision may impair its ability to learn generalizable patterns. To address this, we introduce an Unpredictability Perception loss that dynamically computes a supervision weight. The computation of this weight unifies two assessment dimensions of the intrinsic unpredictability of the forecasting task. The first originates from a posterior analysis of the signal content’s randomness, while the second stems from an a priori consideration of temporal distance. The first dimension, through a complexity-aware weight derived from local spectral entropy, reduces supervision on random segments of the signal. The second dimension, through a temporal decay weight based on exponential decay, lessens supervision for distant future points. Applied to the advanced TimeMixer model, experimental results show that our approach achieves performance improvements across multiple public benchmark datasets. By matching the supervision strength to the intrinsic predictability of the signals, our proposed Unpredictability Perception loss function enhances the forecasting accuracy for sensor network data, providing a more reliable technical foundation for ensuring the stability of critical infrastructures like power grids and optimizing urban traffic systems.