Integrated CNN-LSTM for Photovoltaic Power Prediction based on Spatio-Temporal Feature Fusion

Abstract

The accurate prediction of the output power of each power plant is crucial for effective resource deployment. This paper proposes a convolutional neural network-long short-term memory (CNN-LSTM) network integration model based on spatio-temporal feature fusion. Firstly, the temporal correlation of the PV features of the target power plant and the spatial correlation between the PV power of the target power plant and the PV power of the neighboring power plants are computed. The features are then fused according to the strength of the correlation, which allows the features to be combined with spatial and temporal attributes, which promotes faster and more effective training of the model. Subsequently, an integrated network architecture comprising three individual models, CNN, LSTM, and CNN-LSTM, is designed. The SENet attention mechanism is utilized to add non-linear integration weights to the outputs of the individual models. Due to the variability of different neural networks, the prediction results of the integrated model are often higher than the best-performing individual model. Additionally, we designed different case studies to compare model performance under sunny, rainy, and cloudy conditions. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed integrated approach. When the prediction interval is set to 5 min, the RMSE loss of the integrated model on the test set is reduced by 13.5%, 6.9%, and 5.1% compared to the CNN, LSTM, and CNN-LSTM models included in the ensemble, respectively.