A hybrid model for photovoltaic power prediction of both convolutional and long short-term memory neural networks optimized by genetic algorithm

Abstract

Photovoltaic power generation is affected by weather and geographical environment, showing fluctuations and random multi-interference, and its output power is easy to change with changes in external factors. Therefore, the prediction of output power is crucial to optimize the grid-connected operation of photovoltaic power generation and reduce the impact of uncertainty. This paper proposes a hybrid model of both convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) based on genetic algorithm (GA) optimization (GA-CNN-LSTM). First, the CNN module is used to extract the spatial features of the data, and then the LSTM module is used to extract the temporal features and nearby hidden states. Optimizing the hyperparameter weights and bias values of the LSTM training network through GA. At the initial stage, the historical data is normalized, and all features were analyzed by grey relational degree. Important features are extracted to reduce the computational complexity of the data. Then, the GA-optimized CNN-LSTM hybrid neural network model (GA-CNN-LSTM) is applied for photovoltaic power prediction experiment. The GA-CNN-LSTM model was compared with the single neural network models such as CNN and LSTM, and the CNN-LSTM hybrid neural network model without GA optimization. Under the Mean Absolute Percentage Error index, the GA-CNN-LSTM algorithm proposed in this paper reduces the error by 1.537% compared with the ordinary single neural network model, and 0.873% compared with the unoptimized CNN-LSTM hybrid neural network algorithm model. From the perspective of training and test running time, the GA-CNN-LSTM model takes a little longer than the single neural network model, but the disadvantage is not obvious. To sum up, the performance of GA-CNN-LSTM model for photovoltaic power predicting is better.