Power Grid Behavioral Patterns and Risks of Generalization in Applied Machine Learning

Recent years have seen a rich literature of data-driven approaches designed for power grid applications. However, insufficient consideration of domain knowledge can impose a high risk to the practicality of the methods. Specifically, ignoring the grid-specific spatiotemporal patterns (in load, generation, and topology, etc.) can lead to outputting infeasible, unrealizable, or completely meaningless predictions on new inputs. To address this concern, this paper investigates real-world operational data to provide insights into power grid behavioral patterns, including the time-varying topology, load, and generation, as well as the spatial differences (in peak hours, diverse styles) between individual loads and generations. Then based on these observations, we evaluate the generalization risks in some existing ML works caused by ignoring these grid-specific patterns in model design and training.