Nonlinear PCA for Global Horizontal Irradiance Forecasting

This letter presents a novel technique for the forecast of the ground horizontal irradiance (GHI) from satellite-based images. To enhance the forecast accuracy, spatial information in addition to temporal information has been considered. This produced an increase in the computational load of the forecast process. Dimensionality reduction techniques based on nonlinear principal component analysis (PCA) are used to project the original data set into low-dimension feature space.

A multilayer feedforward neural network classifier is used to model the signal through a training operation involving past history of the considered spatiotemporal signal. Experiments have been carried out on two different data sets. Comparisons with classical forecasting techniques demonstrate that the introduction of the spatial information permits to obtain better short-term forecast measurements for all types of sky conditions. Moreover, further analysis demonstrates that, compared with linear PCA, the nonlinear PCA is more appropriate for dimensionality reduction of spatiotemporal GHI data set.