Combined Optimization and Regression Machine Learning for Solar Irradiation and Wind Speed Forecasting

Abstract

Prediction of solar irradiation and wind speed are essential for enhancing the renewable energy integration into the existing power system grids. However, the deficiencies caused to the network operations provided by their intermittent effects need to be investigated. Regarding reserves management, regulation, scheduling, and dispatching, the intermittency in power output become a challenge for the system operator. This had given the interest of researchers for developing techniques to predict wind speeds and solar irradiation over a large or short-range of temporal and spatial perspectives to accurately deal with the variable power output. Before, several statistical, and even physics, approaches have been applied for prediction. Nowadays, machine learning is widely applied to do it and especially regression models to assess them. Tuning these models is usually done following manual approaches by changing the minimum leaf size of a decision tree, or the box constraint of a support vector machine, for example, that can affect its performance. Instead of performing it manually, this paper proposes to combine optimization methods including the bayesian optimization, grid search, and random search with regression models to extract the best hyper parameters of the model. Finally, the results are compared with the manually tuned models. The Bayesian gives the best results in terms of extracting hyper-parameters by giving more accurate models.