Efficacy and application of the window-sliding ARIMA for daily and weekly wind speed forecasting

Accurate forecasting of renewable energy resources has a deep societal and environmental impact. In this work, we investigate the efficacy and applicability of the Window-Sliding ARIMA (WS-ARIMA) method for daily and weekly forecasting of wind speed. The WS-ARIMA technique with a fixed or variable window length belongs to the class of adaptive models. Particularly, the sliding windows of fixed length are popular in the areas of finance, energy, and traffic management, where the dataset of necessity exhibits a seasonal pattern. To carry out the proposed analysis, the following processes were done: (1) we first perform a stationarity test on the wind speed data and observe weak stationarity; (2) we then apply a grid search method to obtain the optimal parameters of the ARIMA model; (3) we implement the WS-ARIMA method for both daily and weekly wind speed data and compare the results with the conventional ARIMA model, and (4) finally, we perform a residual analysis as a post processing step to examine any systematic bias in the implemented models. The experimental results based on 15 years (2000–2014) of daily and weekly wind speed data collected at four different locations in India reveal that the WS-ARIMA method consistently outperforms the conventional ARIMA method. The inclusion of window sliding in ARIMA has resulted in the overall RMSE reduction up to 75% in daily wind speed data and 50% in the weekly data. Therefore, we recommend the WS-ARIMA model as one of the potential techniques in wind speed forecasting at daily and weekly time horizons.