Transformer-based few-shot learning for modeling Electricity Consumption Profiles with minimal data across thousands of domains

Electricity Consumption Profiles (ECPs) are crucial for operating and planning power distribution systems, especially with the increasing number of low-carbon technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles. Traditional ECP modeling methods typically assume the availability of sufficient ECP data. However, in practice, the accessibility of ECP data is limited due to privacy issues or the absence of metering devices. Few-shot learning (FSL) has emerged as a promising solution for ECP modeling in data-scarce scenarios. Nevertheless, standard FSL methods, such as those used for images, are unsuitable for ECP modeling because (1) these methods usually assume several source domains with sufficient data and several target domains. However, in the context of ECP modeling, there may be thousands of source domains, e.g., households with a moderate amount of data, and thousands of target domains, e.g., households that ECP are required to be modeled. (2) Standard FSL methods usually involve cumbersome knowledge transfer mechanisms, such as pre-training and fine-tuning. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel FSL framework that integrates Transformers with Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) for ECP modeling. The proposed approach is fine-tuning-free, computationally efficient, and robust even with extremely limited data. Results show that our method can accurately restore the complex ECP distribution with a minimal amount of ECP data (e.g., only 1.6% of the complete domain dataset) and outperforms state-of-the-art time series modeling methods in the context of ECP modeling. • Few-shot Transformer–GMM models ECP distributions with only 1.6% target data. • EM-based tuning removes fine-tuning, enabling fast multi-domain deployment. • Consistently outperforms TimesNet, VAE, Flow and Diffusion across resolutions. • Order-invariant design ensures robust modeling with varying shot numbers. • Scales efficiently to thousands of households and transformer-level domains.