Evaluating the significance of samples in deep learning-based transient stability assessment

Abstract

Deep learning-based transient stability assessment has achieved big success in power system analyses. However, it is still unclear how much of the data is superfluous and which samples are important for training. In this work, we introduce the latest technique from the artificial intelligence community to evaluate the significance of the samples used in deep learning model for the transient stability assessment. From empirical experiments, it is found that nearly 50% of the low-significance samples can be pruned without affecting the testing performance at the early training stages, thus saving much computational time and effort. We also observe that the samples with the fault-clearing time close to the critical clearing time often have higher significance indexes, indicating that the decision boundary learned by the deep network is highly related to the transient stability boundary. This is intuitive, but to the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to analyze the connection from sample significance aspects. In addition, we combine the stability scores with the significance index to provide an auxiliary criterion for the degree of stability, indicating the distance between a sample and the stability boundary. The ultimate goal of the study is to create a tool to generate and evaluate some benchmark datasets for the power system transient stability assessment analysis, so that various algorithms can be tested in a unified and standard platform like computer vision or natural language-processing fields.