Interpretable wind speed prediction with multivariate time series and temporal fusion transformers

Wind power has been utilized well in power systems, so steady and successful wind speed forecasting is crucial to security management power grid market economy. To date, most researchers have often discounted the interpretability of prediction models, leading to obscure forecasts. This study puts forward a unique forecasting methodology that incorporates notable decomposition techniques, multifactor interpretable forecasting models, and optimization algorithms. In the proposed model, variational mode decomposition is employed to break down the raw wind speed sequence into a set of intrinsic mode functions. Adaptive differential evolution is then used for optimizing several parameters of temporal fusion transformers (TFT) to achieve satisfactory forecasting performance. TFT is a new attention-based deep learning model that puts together high-performance multi-horizon prediction and interpretable insights into temporal dynamics. Empirical studies using eight real-world 1-h wind speed data sets in Albert, Canada, and Five Points, USA demonstrate that the system using the proposed model outperforms those employing other comparable models in nearly all performance metrics. Examples of TFT's interpretable outputs are the importance ranking of the decomposed wind speed sub-sequences and meteorological data and attention analysis of different step lengths. The findings signify substantial progress for wind speed prediction and aid policymakers.