Efficient Wind Power Prediction Using Machine Learning Methods: A Comparative Study

Wind power represents a promising source of renewable energies. Precise forecasting of wind power generation is crucial to mitigate the challenges of balancing supply and demand in the smart grid. Nevertheless, the major difficulty in wind power is its high fluctuation and intermittent nature, making it challenging to forecast. This study aims to develop efficient data-driven models to accurately forecast wind power generation. Crucially, the main contributions of this work are listed in the following major elements. Firstly, we investigate the performance of enhanced machine learning models to forecast univariate wind power time-series data. Specifically, we employed Bayesian optimization (BO) to optimally tune hyperparameters of the Gaussian process regression (GPR), Support Vector Regression (SVR) with different kernels, and ensemble learning (ES) models (i.e., Boosted trees and Bagged trees) and investigated their forecasting performance. Secondly, dynamic information has been incorporated in their construction to further enhance the forecasting performance of the investigated models. Specifically, we introduce lagged measurements to enable capturing time evolution into the design of the considered models. Furthermore, more input variables (e.g., wind speed and wind direction) are used to further improve wind prediction performance. Actual measurements from three wind turbines in France, Turkey, and Kaggle are used to verify the efficiency of the considered models. The results reveal the benefit of considering lagged data and input variables to better forecast wind power. The results also showed that the optimized GPR and ensemble models outperformed the other machine learning models.