A Machine Learning-Based Gradient Boosting Regression Approach for Wind Power Production Forecasting: A Step towards Smart Grid Environments

Abstract

In the last few years, several countries have accomplished their determined renewable energy targets to achieve their future energy requirements with the foremost aim to encourage sustainable growth with reduced emissions, mainly through the implementation of wind and solar energy. In the present study, we propose and compare five optimized robust regression machine learning methods, namely, random forest, gradient boosting machine (GBM), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), decision-tree, and extra tree regression, which are applied to improve the forecasting accuracy of short-term wind energy generation in the Turkish wind farms, situated in the west of Turkey, on the basis of a historic data of the wind speed and direction. Polar diagrams are plotted and the impacts of input variables such as the wind speed and direction on the wind energy generation are examined. Scatter curves depicting relationships between the wind speed and the produced turbine power are plotted for all of the methods and the predicted average wind power is compared with the real average power from the turbine with the help of the plotted error curves. The results demonstrate the superior forecasting performance of the algorithm incorporating gradient boosting machine regression.