Decomposition-based wind speed forecasting model using causal convolutional network and attention mechanism

With the growth of global energy demand, the proportion of the total installed wind capacity continues to increase. Wind speed forecasting is essential to enhance the utilization of wind energy. However, it is not easy to make accurate wind speed forecasting since wind speed time series data has nonlinearity, fluctuation, and intermittence. These features of wind speed time series data make classical models unable to obtain expected forecasting results. Many researchers proposed wind speed forecasting models to overcome the shortage. Nevertheless, some wind speed prediction methods are limited because they cannot mine all implicit features of wind speed data. This paper proposes a novel wind speed forecasting model that can capture all implicit information of wind speed data and obtain accuracy prediction results. To be specific, ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) is firstly applied to remove the noise in the original wind speed data. Secondly, we build a novel deep learning model based on the attention mechanism and convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed forecasting model can focus the important part of wind speed data and reduce the high computational complexity of CNN. Finally, a full connect neural network layer is employed to obtain wind speed forecasting results. In order to validate the performance of the proposed model, we take the wind speed data of the M2 tower at 20-meter height of the National Wind Power Technology Center of the United States as an example. The experimental results demonstrate that the forecasting errors of the proposed model are smaller than other comparative models. And the Diebold-Mariano test confirms that the proposed model exhibits a significant difference in performance compared with the comparison models.