A Novel Interpretable Model for Solar Radiation Prediction based on Adaptive Fuzzy Clustering and Linguistic Hedges

Abstract

The designs of solar energy systems depend mainly on the solar radiation that reaches the earth's surface, as it is difficult to determine the amount of solar radiation precisely due to several climatic, geographical and temporal factors. Therefore, forecasting of solar radiation is necessary before using solar energy systems. In this paper, the researchers present an accuracy MAMDANI fuzzy inference system for solar radiation prediction with meteorological data. This system is based with a two-stage method for Fuzzy Rules Learning through Clustering (FRLC). In the first stage, the subtractive clustering is used to extract the fuzzy rules, the second stage is a linguistic approximation and a refinement of the learned solutions with linguistic hedges. FRLC is compared to multilayer feed-forward neural network and support vector regression. The results of the experiments show the efficacy of linguistic fuzzy rules in the forecasting of solar radiation. In parallel with the prediction, the model provides a good balance between interpretability and accuracy.