Short-Term Wind Speed Prediction Study Based on Variational Mode Decompositions–Sparrow Search Algorithm–Gated Recurrent Units

Improving the accuracy of short-term wind speed predictions is crucial for mitigating the impact on power systems when integrating wind power into an electricity grid. This study developed a hybrid short-term wind speed prediction method, termed VMD–SSA–GRU, by combining variational mode decomposition (VMD) with gated recurrent units (GRUs) and optimizing it using a sparrow search algorithm (SSA). Initially, VMD was used to decompose the wind speed time series into subtime series. After reconstructing these subtime series, a GRU model was employed to establish separate prediction models for each series. Furthermore, an enhanced SSA was proposed to optimize the hyperparameters of the GRU model, which improved the prediction accuracy. Ultimately, the sub-series predictions were aggregated to produce the final wind speed prediction values. The predictive accuracy of this model was validated using the wind speed data measured at a meteorological station near a bridge site. The performance of the VMD–SSA–GRU model was compared with several other hybrid models, including those using wavelet transform, long short-term memory, and other neural networks. Comparably, the RMSE value of the VMD-SSA-GRU model was lower by 25.3%, 60.2%, and 61.7% in comparison to the VMD–SSA–LSTM, VMD–GRU, and VMD–LSTM models, respectively. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved higher prediction accuracy than traditional methods.