Hyperbolic Tangent Basis Function Neural Networks Training by Hybrid Evolutionary Programming for Accurate Short-Term Wind Speed Prediction

This paper proposes a neural network model for wind speed prediction, a very important task in wind parks management. Currently, several physical-statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) wind speed prediction models are used to this end. A recently proposed hybrid model is based on hybridizations of global and mesoscale forecasting systems, with a final downscaling step using a multilayer perceptron (MLP). In this paper, we test an alternative neural model for this final step of downscaling, in which projection hyperbolic tangent units (HTUs) are used within feed forward neural networks. The architecture, weights and node typology of the HTU-based network are learnt using a hybrid evolutionary programming algorithm. This new methodology is tested over a real problem of wind speed forecasting, in which we show that our method is able to improve the performance of previous MLPs, obtaining an interpretable model of final regression for each turbine in the wind park.