Robust multi-step wind speed forecasting based on a graph-based data reconstruction deep learning method

Abstract

Against global warming, wind energy has increasingly become a stable form of power supply. Accurate prediction of wind speed is crucial for turbine control and wind farm dispatch, contributing to stable and continued wind energy utilization. However, it is very difficult to accomplish satisfactory wind speed forecasting, especially multi-step forecasting, due to the stochastic, random and volatile characteristic of wind speed series with complex fluctuations. This study is elaborated to propose a novel method based on “data graph” reconstruction and long short term memory (LSTM) network, to achieve accurate and robust multi-step wind speed forecasting. To obtain implicit correlations between wind speed series, the time series data are reconstructed into matrices like “data graphs”. To achieve better computing efficiency and forecasting accuracy, the convolutional neural network (CNN) is adopted to extract the features in the “data graphs”. Then the extracted data graph features are imported into the bidirectional-LSTM (bi-LSTM) network module, which takes the input in forward and backward directions, respectively, to extract more temporal information. For adequate performance assessment, experiments are carried out on data sets of an actual wind farm located in a mountainous region in China. The results show that the proposed method outperforms classic meta-model based and hybrid-model based methods in accuracy, stability and computing efficiency. The results reveal that the data graph reconstruction combined with the CNN is able to extract the hidden features of the wind speed time series data. The proposed CNN-bi-LSTM method effectively improve the multi-step wind speed prediction accuracy.