Deep learning for power quality

Abstract

• This paper reviews the latest application of deep learning to power quality. It presents the main barriers, research gaps, gains and suggestions for applying deep learning to power quality. • The barriers of implementing deep learning to power quality are lack of novelty, low transparency of deep learning methods and lack of benchmark databases. • The research gaps are applications of semi-supervised learning, explainable deep learning, and hybrid approaches combining deep learning with expert systems. • The suggestions to overcome the present limitations are: providing a stronger collaboration among the grid stakeholders and academy to keep track of power quality events; proper labelling and enlarging of datasets in deep learning methods; explaining the end-to-end decision making of deep learning methods; providing open-access databases for comparison purposes. • Deep learning still requires power quality expert knowledge to implement and analyse the automatic results. This paper aims to introduce deep learning to the power quality community by reviewing the latest applications and discussing the open challenges of this technology. Publications covering deep learning to power quality are stratified in terms of application, type of data, and learning technique. This work shows that the majority of the deep learning applications to power quality are based on unrealistic synthetic data and supervised learning without proper labelling. Some applications with deep learning have already been solved by previous machine learning methods or expert systems. The main barriers to implementing deep learning to power quality are related to lack of novelty, low transparency of the deep learning methods, and lack of benchmark databases. This work also discusses that even with automatic feature extraction by deep learning methods, power quality expert knowledge is still needed to implement and analyse the results. The main research gaps identified in this work are related to the applications of semi-supervised learning, explainable deep learning and hybrid approaches combining deep learning with expert systems. Suggestions for overcoming the present limitations are: providing a stronger collaboration among the grid stakeholders and academy to keep track of power quality events; proper labelling and enlarging of datasets in deep learning methods; explaining the end-to-end decision making of deep learning methods; providing open-access databases for comparison purposes.