Natural disasters and extreme meteorological events are primary causes of unplanned outages in modern power systems. Existing early warning methods suffer from insufficient non-linear feature extraction, severe class imbalance, and limited minority-class recall under single-classifier architectures. This paper proposes a seven-class meteorological fault early warning framework that integrates a sparse autoencoder (SAE), a G1–entropy composite weighting scheme, SMOTE oversampling, and a soft-voting BP–XGBoost ensemble. A leakage-free experimental protocol confines SMOTE exclusively to the training partition, eliminating data contamination from evaluation. Validated on 1955 fault records from a regional grid in East China covering 110 kV, 220 kV, and 500 kV voltage levels (2013–2022), the proposed framework achieved 96.42% accuracy and a 97.46% macro F1-score on the held-out test set, outperforming SVM (72.68%), Random Forest (89.31%), LSTM (81.47%), 1D-CNN (85.38%), and LightGBM (92.15%). Ablation experiments confirmed that SMOTE and G1–entropy weighting contributed macro F1 gains of 8.34 and 6.91 percentage points, respectively, while removing the XGBoost branch degraded accuracy by 28.25%. Temporal validation on 2019–2022 records yielded 91.57% accuracy, confirming temporal generalization. Error analysis further revealed that bidirectional misclassification between lightning damage and wind damage, rooted in shared atmospheric instability signatures, constitutes the dominant residual error source, providing theoretical guidance for future threshold optimization strategies.
Li et al. (Sat,) studied this question.