Deep belief rule based photovoltaic power forecasting method with interpretability

Accurate prediction of photovoltaic (PV) output power is of great significance for reasonable scheduling and development management of power grids. In PV power generation prediction system, there are two problems: the uncertainty of PV power generation and the inexplicability of the prediction result. The belief rule base (BRB) is a rule-based modeling method and can deal with uncertain information. Moreover, the modeling process of BRB has a certain degree of interpretability. However, rule explosion and the inexplicability of the optimized model limit the modeling ability of BRB in complex systems. Thus, a PV output power prediction model is proposed based on a deep belief rule base with interpretability (DBRB-I). In the DBRB-I model, the deep BRB structure is constructed to solve the rule explosion problem, and inefficient rules are simplified by a sensitivity analysis of the rules, which reduces the complexity of the model. Moreover, to ensure that the interpretability of the model is not destroyed, a new optimization method based on the projection covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (P-CMA-ES) algorithm is designed. Finally, a case study of the prediction of PV output power is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.