Wind speed prediction with RBF neural network based on PCA and ICA

Yagang Zhang – Chenhong Zhang – Yuan Zhao – Shuang Gao

   Thanks to non-pollution and sustainability of wind energy, it has become the main source of power generation in the new era worldwide. However, the inherent random fluctuation and intermittency of wind power have negative effects on the safe and stable operation of power system and the quality of power. The key solving this problem is to improve the accuracy of wind speed prediction. In the paper, considering the forecasting accuracy is affected by many factors, we propose that, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is combined with Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to process the sample, which can weaken the mutual interference between the various factors, extract accurately independent component reflected the characteristics of wind farm and achieve the purpose of improving the accuracy of wind speed prediction. At the same time, the adaptive and self-learning ability of neural network is more suitable for wind speed sequence prediction. The prediction results demonstrate that compared with the traditional neural network predicting model (RBF, BP, Elman), this model makes full use of the information provided by varieties of relevant factors, weakens the volatility of wind speed sequence and significantly enhances the short-term wind speed forecasting accuracy. The research work in the paper can help wind farm reasonably arrange the power dispatching plan, reduce the power operation cost and effectively boost the large-scale development and utilization of renewable energy.

Keywords: renewable energy, wind speed prediction, PCA, ICA, artificial neural network

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