Principal Component Analysis and Machine Learning Approaches for Photovoltaic Power Prediction: A Comparative Study

Nowadays, in the context of the industrial revolution 4.0, considerable volumes of data are being generated continuously from intelligent sensors and connected objects. The proper understanding and use of these amounts of data are crucial levers of performance and innovation. Machine learning is the technology that allows the full potential of big datasets to be exploited. As a branch of artificial intelligence, it enables us to discover patterns and make predictions from data based on statistics, data mining, and predictive analysis. The key goal of this study was to use machine learning approaches to forecast the hourly power produced by photovoltaic panels. A comparison analysis of various predictive models including elastic net, support vector regression, random forest, and Bayesian regularized neural networks was carried out to identify the models providing the best predicting results. The principal components analysis used to reduce the dimensionality of the input data revealed six main factor components that could explain up to 91.95% of the variation in all variables. Finally, performance metrics demonstrated that Bayesian regularized neural networks achieved the best results, giving an accuracy of R-2 = 99.99% and RMSE = 0.002 kW.