Short-term wind power forecasting based on multivariate/multi-step LSTM with temporal feature attention mechanism

Precision enhancement for short-term wind power forecasting can alleviate negative impact of the forecasting results on wind power generation. Due to complexities and nonlinearities among factors and facets in wind power, it is essential to achieve reliable and stable power generation via the long short-term memory (LSTM) forecasting. To this purpose, multi-task temporal feature attention (MTTFA) based LSTM, namely MTTFA-LSTM, is proposed for multivariate/multi-step wind power forecasting with historical power and meteorological data, in which task-sharing and task-specifying layers are designed for task co-features extracting and task specifics discriminating, respectively. More specifically, in the task-sharing layer, multi-dimensional inputs are fed into LSTM to extract long-term trends, while in the task-specifying layer, one-dimensional convolution operations extract temporal features hidden in each and all time steps. Furthermore, an attention mechanism is adopted to adaptively tune weights for temporal features. Finally, the proposed model is leveraged to cope with different short-term wind power forecasting (SWPF) problems based on the national renewable energy laboratory's (NREL) wind power data. Simulation results show that the proposed MTTFA-LSTM achieves persistent excellent forecasting accuracy, comparing its backbone STL model, TFA-LSTM as well as the benchmark MTL models in the same setting, which indicate that the complex and non-linear interdependencies among multi-dimensional data can be well depicted by the proposed model.