Data-driven wind speed forecasting using deep feature extraction and LSTM

Wind speed forecasting is important for high-efficiency utilisation of wind energy and management of grid-connected power systems. Due to the noise, instability and irregularity of atmosphere system, the current models based on raw historical data have encountered many problems. In this study, a deep novel feature extraction approach is developed based on stacked denoising autoencoders and batch normalisation. Then the deep features extracted from raw historical data are fed to long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks for prediction. Meanwhile, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise is employed to process the numerical weather prediction data. By picking out the abnormal samples, the representative training samples are selected to improve the efficiency of the model. For illustration and verification purposes, the proposed model is used to predict the wind speed of Wind Atlas for South Africa (WASA). Empirical results show that deep feature extraction can improve the forecasting accuracy of LSTM 49% than feature selection, indicating that proper feature extraction is crucial to wind speed forecasting. And the proposed model outperforms other benchmark methods at least 17%. Hence, the proposed model is promising for wind speed forecasting.