Performance Evaluation of Discrete Wavelet Transform and Machine Learning Based Techniques for Classifying Power Quality Disturbances

This paper evaluates the performance of six different machine learning (ML) algorithms for classifying power quality disturbances (PQDs), with statistical features extracted using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) as feature input. The statistical features have been extracted from coefficients of multi-resolution analysis (MRA) using four different mother wavelets: Daubechies 4 (‘db4’), ‘haar’, Discrete Meyer (‘dmey’), Coiflets 4 (‘coif4’). The performance analysis has been carried out with 5,500 synthetic signals pertaining to eleven different PQDs generated in accordance with IEEE 1159-2019. Moreover, the performance of the classifiers trained with synthetic signals has been investigated under the influence of unseen noisy signals, hardware PQD signals obtained from the experimental setup, and real PQD events. The analysis indicates that the performance of the extra tree (ET) classifier with the features extracted using ‘haar’ as a mother wavelet is superior and robust in comparison to other classifiers, viz k-nearest neighbor (kNN), random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), logistic regression model (LRM), and gaussian naïve bayes (GNB) with features extracted using different mother wavelets. Furthermore, the ‘haar-ET’ based technique demonstrated remarkable performance in classifying PQDs, showing strong generalization to both unseen hardware and noisy signals, and achieving consistent results when tested with real PQD events.