Enhanced Random Forest Model for Robust Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Forecasting Using Weather Measurements

Short-term Photovoltaic (PV) Power Forecasting (STPF) is considered a topic of utmost importance in smart grids. The deployment of STPF techniques provides fast dispatching in the case of sudden variations due to stochastic weather conditions. This paper presents an efficient data-driven method based on enhanced Random Forest (RF) model. The proposed method employs an ensemble of attribute selection techniques to manage bias/variance optimization for STPF application and enhance the forecasting quality results. The overall architecture strategy gathers the relevant information to constitute a voted feature-weighting vector of weather inputs. The main emphasis in this paper is laid on the knowledge expertise obtained from weather measurements. The feature selection techniques are based on local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations, Extreme Boosting Model, and Elastic Net. A comparative performance investigation using an actual database, collected from the weather sensors, demonstrates the superiority of the proposed technique versus several data-driven machine learning models when applied to a typical distributed PV system.