A deep‐learning based solar irradiance forecast using missing data

Abstract Irradiance prediction is a vital task in the renewable energy field. Its aim is to forecast the irradiance or power of a photovoltaic plant and thus provide a reference for stabilizing the power grid. In the real scenarios, missing data can significantly reduce the accuracy of the prediction. Meanwhile, due to the unawareness of the distribution of datasets, it is difficult to choose a suitable imputation method before modeling. Also, different imputation methods do not have the same good effects on different datasets. In this article, a recurrent neural network with an adaptive neural imputation module is proposed for forecasting direct solar irradiance using missing data. The model predicts future 4‐h irradiance based on the missing historical climate and irradiance data without imputing the data in pre‐processing stage. The proposed model is tested on the open access datasets, with missing values generated randomly in all input series. The model performance is compared under various missing rates and different input factors with other imputation methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform other methods under different evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the authors integrate the model with the attention mechanism and find it has better performance at high irradiance.