Comparative Analysis of LSTM and Hybrid Attention-Based Architectures for Short-Term Electricity Consumption Forecasting: A Case Study in Togo
TAccurate short-term electricity consumption forecasting is essential for operational planning, reserve allocation, and energy management in modern power systems. This study investigates the performance of recurrent and hybrid attention-based deep learning architectures for short-term electricity consumption forecasting, a sase study in Togo. The proposed framework integrates electricity consumption, meteorological, demographic, and temporal information in order to capture both intrinsic temporal dependencies and exogenous influences affecting electricity demand. Four forecasting architectures were evaluated using a weekly temporal window of 168 hours: LSTM-only, LSTM-decoder, LSTM-attention, and a hybrid LSTM--Multi-Head Attention--LSTM model. The experiments included multi-seed evaluation, ablation study, robustness analysis, and statistical comparison using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The results show that all models achieved extremely high forecasting accuracy, with coefficients of determination exceeding 0.9998 and MAPE values below 0.004%. The hybrid architectures slightly improved average forecasting performance, while the standalone LSTM model remained highly competitive. The robustness analysis revealed strong sensitivity to noisy inputs but moderate degradation under missing-data conditions. Statistical analysis indicated that the performance differences between architectures were not statistically significant at the 5% level. Overall, the study demonstrates that recurrent deep learning architectures provide reliable and operationally relevant solutions for electricity consumption forecasting in highly structured energy demand series.