A New Hybrid Approach for Wind Speed Forecasting Applying Support Vector Machine with Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition and Cuckoo Search Algorithm

Wind speed forecasting plays a crucial role in improving the efficiency of wind farms, and increases the competitive advantage of wind power in the global electricity market. Many forecasting models have been proposed, aiming to enhance the forecast performance. However, some traditional models used in our experiment have the drawback of ignoring the importance of data preprocessing and the necessity of parameter optimization, which often results in poor forecasting performance. Therefore, in order to achieve a more satisfying performance in forecasting wind speed data, a new short-term wind speed forecasting method which consists of Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) for data preprocessing, and the Support Vector Machine (SVM)—whose key parameters are optimized by the Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSO)—is developed in this paper. This method avoids the shortcomings of some traditional models and effectively enhances the forecasting ability. To test the prediction ability of the proposed model, 10 min wind speed data from wind farms in Shandong Province, China, are used for conducting experiments. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model cannot only improve the forecasting accuracy, but can also be an effective tool in assisting the management of wind power plants.