Comparison Between Random Forest and Recurrent Neural Network for Photovoltaic Power Forecasting

Objectives : Photovoltaic power generation which significantly depends on meteorological conditions is intermittent and unstable. Therefore, accurate forecasting of photovoltaic power generation is a challenging task. In this research, random forest (RF), recurrent neural network (RNN), long short term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU) are proposed and we will find an efficient model for forecasting photovoltaic power generation of photovoltaic power plants. Methods : We used photovoltaic power generation data from photovoltaic power plants at Gamcheonhang-ro, Saha-gu, Busan, and meteorological data from Busan Regional Meteorological Administration. We used solar irradiance, temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, duration of sunshine, and cloud amount as input variables. By applying the trial and error method, we optimized hyperparameters such as estimators in RF, and number of hidden layers, number of nodes, epochs, and validation split in RNN, LSTM, and GRU. We compared proposed models by evaluation indexes such as coefficient of determination (R2), root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE). Results and Discussion : The best RF at 1,000 of number of decision tree achieved test R2=0.865, test RMSE=16.013, and test MAE=9.656. The best choice of RNN was 6 hidden layers and the number of nodes in each layer was 90. We set the epochs at 450. RNN achieved test R2=0.942, test RMSE=10.530, and test MAE=6.390. To find the best result of LSTM, we used 3 hidden layers, and the number of nodes was 600. The epochs were set to 200. LSTM achieved test R2=0.944, test RMSE=10.29, and test MAE=6.360. GRU was set to 3 hidden layer and the number of nodes was 450. The epochs were set to 500. GRU achieved test R2=0.945, test RMSE=10.189, and test MAE=5.968. Conclusions : We found RNN, LSTM, and GRU performed better than RF, and GRU model showed the best performance. Therefore, GRU is the most efficient model to predict photovoltaic power generation in Busan, Korea.