Short-term solar irradiance prediction based on spatiotemporal graph convolutional recurrent neural network

Solar irradiance data include temporal information and geospatial information, so solar irradiance prediction can be regarded as a spatiotemporal sequence prediction problem. However, at present, most of the research is based on time series prediction models, and the research studies on spatial-temporal series prediction models are relatively few. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate spatial-temporal information to construct a spatial-temporal sequence prediction model for research. In this paper, the spatial-temporal prediction model based on graph convolutional network (GCN) and long short-term memory network (LSTM) was established for short-term solar irradiance prediction. In this model, solar radiation observatories were modeled as undirected graphs, where each node corresponds to an observatory, and a GCN was used to capture spatial correlations between sites. For each node, temporal features were extracted by using a LSTM. In order to evaluate the prediction performance of this model, six solar radiation observatories located in the Xinjiang region of China were selected; together with widely used persistence model seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average and data-driven prediction models such as convolutional neural network, recurrent neural network, and LSTM, comparisons were made under different seasons and weather conditions. The experimental results show that the average root mean square error of the GCN-LSTM model at the six sites is 62.058 W/m2, which is reduced by 9.8%, 14.3%, 6.9%, and 3.3%, respectively, compared with other models; the average MAE is 25.376 W/m2, which is reduced by 27.7%, 26.5%, 20.1%, and 11%, respectively, compared with other models; the average R2 is 0.943, which is improved by 1.4%, 2.2%, 0.8%, and 0.4%, respectively, compared with other models.