Multistep short-term wind speed forecasting using transformer

Wind power can effectively alleviate the energy crisis. However, its integration into the grid affects power quality and power grid stability. Accurate wind speed prediction is a key factor in the efficient use of wind power. Because of its intermittent and nonstationary nature, wind speed forecasting is difficult, and is the topic of much research, especially long-time multistep forecasts. In this paper, the multistep wind speed prediction problem is regarded as a sequence-to-sequence mapping problem, and a multistep wind speed prediction model based on a transformer is proposed. This model is based on an encoder–decoder architecture, where the encoder generates representations of historical wind speed sequences of any length, the decoder generates arbitrarily long future wind speed sequences, and the encoder and decoder are associated by an attention mechanism. At the same time, the encoder and decoder of Transformer are completely based on a multi-head attention mechanism. For easy modeling, a 1-dimensional original wind speed sequence is transformed to a 16-dimensional sequence by ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), and the multidimensional wind speed data are directly modeled with Transformer. We trained the model with very large-scale (19 years of data) wind speed data averaged at 10-minute intervals, and performed the evaluation over one-year wind speed data. Results show that our one-step forecast model achieved an average mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.167 and 0.221, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, our 3-, 6-, 12-, and 24-hour multistep forecast model achieves a new state of the art in wind speed forecasting, with respective MAEs of 0.243, 0.290, 0.362, and 0.453, and RMSEs of 0.326, 0.401, 0.513, and 0.651. It is believed that performance can be further improved with better model parameter optimization.