Performance comparison of Variational Mode Decomposition over Empirical Wavelet Transform for the classification of power quality disturbances using Support Vector Machine

This work considers the classification of power quality disturbances based on VMD (Variational Mode Decomposition) and EWT (Empirical Wavelet Transform) using SVM (Support Vector Machine). Performance comparison of VMD over EWT is done for producing feature vectors that can extract salient and unique nature of these disturbances. In this paper, these two adaptive signal processing methods are used to produce three Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) components of power quality signals. Feature vectors produced by finding sines and cosines of statistical parameter vector of three different IMF candidates are used for training SVM. Validation for six different classes of power qualities including normal sinusoidal signal, sag, swell, harmonics, sag with harmonics, swell with harmonics is performed using synthetic data in MATLAB. Classification results using SVM shows that VMD outperforms over EWT for feature extraction process and the classification accuracy is tabled. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.