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In wind power prediction, the input probability distributions in the different sub-periods are shifted owing to the strong randomness of the input features, such as wind speed and direction. This may violate the assumption for machine learning that the training and test data meet the condition of being independent and identically distributed, resulting in an insufficient generalization ability of the prediction model that is trained with the training data and applied to unknown test data. To address this problem, this study proposes an adaptive temporal transformer method for short-term wind power forecasting. First, a temporal transformer model with a gate recurrent unit and multi-head attention layers was used to extract the short- and long-term temporal information of the multiple input variables. Then, an adaptive learning strategy consisting of two stages—temporal distribution characterization and temporal distribution matching—was developed to explore the common knowledge hidden in each sub-period. The case results for an actual wind farm in northwest China showed that the proposed method could effectively weaken the adverse effects of the shifts in time series distribution on forecasting and improve the accuracy and generalization of short-term wind power prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]