A novel hybrid framework for wind speed forecasting using autoencoder‐based convolutional long short‐term memory network

Abstract

A precise forecast of wind speed is a fundamental requirement of wind power integration. The nonlinear and intermittent nature of the wind makes wind speed forecasting (WSF) complicated for linear approaches. Addressing the complications faced by the linear approaches, this paper proposed a novel and robust approach using long short-term memory (LSTM) autoencoder, convolutional neural network (CNN), and LSTM model for enhanced WSF. The proposed hybrid approach is divided into two main components: feature encoding, dimensionality reduction using LSTM autoencoder and forecasting using convolutional LSTM. In the first stage, the LSTM autoencoder eliminates the uncertainties present in raw wind speed data and also reduces the computational load on the forecasting convolutional LSTM approach. Then, in the second stage, CNN is used to extract the optimum features, and the LSTM network is used to forecast the wind speed. Five different benchmark forecasting models are used to evaluate and study the proposed hybrid approach's performance. The experiment is performed with real-time wind speed data from the Garden city wind farm, USA. The proposed hybrid approach performance is verified using various performance metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach improved by 40% over the second best benchmark forecasting approach.