Spatio-Temporal Denoising Graph Autoencoders with Data Augmentation for Photovoltaic Data Imputation

Abstract

The integration of the global Photovoltaic (PV) market with real time data-loggers has enabled large scale PV data analytical pipelines for power forecasting and reliability assessment of PV fleets. Nevertheless, the performance of PV data analysis depends on the quality of PV timeseries data. We propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Denoising Graph Autoencoder STD-GAE framework to impute missing PV Power Data. STD-GAE exploits temporal correlation, spatial coherence, and value dependencies from domain knowledge to recover missing data. It is empowered by two modules. (1) To cope with sparse yet various scenarios of missing data, STD-GAE incorporates a domain-knowledge aware data augmentation module to create plausible variations of missing data patterns. This generalizes STD-GAE to robust imputation over different seasons and environment. (2) STD-GAE nontrivially integrates spatiotemporal graph convolution layers and denoising autoencoder to improve the accuracy of imputation accuracy at PV fleet level. Experimental results on two PV datasets show that STD-GAE can achieve a gain of 43.14% in imputation accuracy and remains less sensitive to missing rate, different seasons, and missing scenarios, compared with state-of-the-art data imputation methods.

Using spatio-temporal graph neural networks to estimate fleet-wide photovoltaic performance degradation patterns

“…Existing spatio-temporal graph neural networks (stGNNs) are mostly designed for short-term predictive regression analysis [17][18][19][20]. Little has been done for leveraging spatio-temporal coherences learned by stGNNs to conduct long-term trend analysis.…”

“…Inspired by the success of emerging neural networks and spatiotemporal graph models in PV research [17][18][19][20], we propose our novel approach called PV-stGNN-PLR, a meteorology agnostic PLR estimation model. Previous methods have modeled the PV timeseries datasets as a series of spatio-temporal (st)-graphs.…”