Unfixed Seasonal Partition Based on Symbolic Aggregate Approximation for Forecasting Solar Power Generation Using Deep Learning

Solar energy is an important alternative energy source, and it is essential to forecast solar power generation for efficient power management. Due to the seasonal characteristics of weather features, seasonal data partition strategies help develop prediction models that perform better in extreme weather-related situations. Most existing studies rely on fixed season partitions, such as meteorological and astronomical, where the start and end dates are specific. However, even if the countries are in the same Northern or Southern Hemisphere, seasonal changes can occur due to abnormal climates such as global warming. Therefore, we propose a novel unfixed seasonal data partition based on Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SAX) to forecast solar power generation. Here, symbolic representations generated by SAX are used to select seasonal features and obtain seasonal criteria. We then employ two-layer stacked LSTM and combine predictions from various seasonal features and partitions through ensemble methods. The datasets used in the experiments are from real-world solar panel plants such as in Gyeongju, South Korea; and in California, USA. The results of the experiments show that the proposed methods perform better than non-partitioned or fixed-partitioned solar power generation forecasts. They outperform them by 2.2% to 3.5%; and 1.6% to 6.5% in the Gyeongju and California datasets, respectively.