Interpretable Machine Learning In Sustainable Edge Computing: A Case Study of Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Output Prediction

With the Internet of Things continuously penetrating into all spheres of our daily lives, the increasing use of smart devices enabled the emergence of the edge computing paradigm. To meet the needs of saving energy and reducing electricity bills for each household, solar energy is exploited by using photovoltaic (PV) panels that can be integrated into an edge computing platform based on a cost-effective scheduling scheme. However, it is still a major challenge to determine the optimal energy allocation of renewable energy due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy generation. In this paper, we propose a unified clustering-based prediction framework with two tree-based algorithms to provide short-term prediction of PV power output. We also provide the in-terpretability analysis for our approach to reveal the features that are important for the prediction. The experimental results show our proposed framework is superior to other benchmark machine learning algorithms.