A comprehensive application of machine learning techniques for short-term solar radiation prediction

Abstract

Forecasting the output power of solar PV systems is required for the good operation of the power grid and the optimal management of energy fluxes occurring in the solar system. Before forecasting the solar system’s output, it is essential to focus on the prediction of solar irradiance. In this paper, the solar radiation data collected for two years in a certain place in Jiangsu in China are investigated. The objective of this paper is to improve the ability of short-term solar radiation prediction. Firstly, missing data are recovered through the means of matrix completion. Then the completed data are denoised via robust principal component analysis. To reduce the influence of weather types on solar radiation, spectral clustering is adopted by fusing sparse subspace representation and k-nearest-neighbor to partition the data into three clusters. Next, for each cluster, four neural networks are established to predict the short-term solar radiation. The experimental results show that the proposed method can enhance the solar radiation accuracy.