Multi-model approach applied to meteorological data for solar radiation forecasting using data-driven approaches

Abstract

The accuracy of the solar forecasting model depends upon various factors such as attributes of the data, time horizon, time interval, length of the data, etc. This means attributes of data selection are an important feature of any solar forecasting model. A lot of research has been done on solar forecasting using deep learning and machine learning approaches, providing better accuracy for a particular type of model and data. However, how to accurately apply the multi-model techniques in the data-driven approaches of the solar radiation prediction model is still a challenging issue due to the complexity of the temporal resolution, length, and attribute selection of the data. This paper proposes a multi-model technique using data-driven approaches to get an improvised solar forecasting model with respect to the attributes of data. In this research, a multi-model method based on data-driven approaches is developed for short-term solar radiation forecasting. Three years of weather data with different temporal resolutions taken from reliable online sources were used for training and testing in this work. The weather data considered various input parameters such as temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed, and wind direction; solar radiation data is considered the model’s target variable. This work is a two-stage process. In the first stage, multi-model methods are analyzed based on solar forecasts at different temporal resolutions, and best-performing models are selected. The optimization technique is applied to the best model in the second stage to obtain an improvised solar forecasting model. It is observed that the multi-model forecasts provide better accuracy in terms of R2, nRMSE, and MAE than the conventional forecasting model. In this work, the performance parameters of nRMSE = 0.34, MAE = 4.71, and R2 = 0.93 are obtained before optimization, and nRMSE = 0.25, MAE = 1.39 and R2 = 0.96 are obtained after optimization in the testing stage for an hourly dataset. For daily datasets, the performance parameters nRMSE = 0.24, MAE = 3.19, and R2 = 0.93 are obtained before optimization, and nRMSE = 0.16, MAE = 2.61, and R2 = 0.95 are obtained after optimization in the testing stage. As a result, the proposed algorithm focused on an efficient model to predict solar radiation. Accurate solar radiation prediction models are highly in demand in various smart grid applications. Therefore, the proposed work may help in suggesting a suitable model for solar energy forecasting.