Enhancing wind power prediction with self-attentive variational autoencoders: A comparative study

Accurate wind power prediction is critical for efficient grid management and the integration of renewable energy sources into the power grid. This study presents an effective deep-learning approach that improves short-term wind power forecasting accuracy. The method incorporates a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with a self-attention mechanism applied in both the encoder and decoder. This empowers the model to leverage VAE's strengths in time-series modeling and nonlinear approximation while focusing on the most relevant features within the wind power data. The effectiveness of this approach is evaluated through a comprehensive comparison with eight established deep learning methods, including Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, Bidirectional LSTMs (BiLSTMs), Convolutional LSTMs (ConvLSTMs), Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), Stacked Autoencoders (SAEs), Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), and vanilla VAEs. Real-world data from five wind turbines in France and Turkey is used for the evaluation. Five statistical metrics are employed to quantitatively assess the prediction performance of each method. The results indicate that the SA-VAE model consistently outperformed other models, achieving the highest average R2 value of 0.992, demonstrating its superior predictive capability compared to existing techniques.