The effects on classifier performance of 2D discrete wavelet transform analysis and whale optimization algorithm for recognition of power quality disturbances

Power Quality (PQ) is becoming more and more important day by day in the electric network. Signal processing, pattern recognition and machine learning are increasingly being studied for the automatic recognition of any disturbances that may occur during the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity. There are three main steps to identify the PQ disturbances. These include the use of signal processing methods to calculate the features representing the disturbances, the selection of those that are more useful than these feature sets to prevent the creation of a complex classification model, the creating a classification model that recognizes multiple classes using the selected feature subsets. In this study, one-dimensional (1D) PQ disturbances signals are transformed into two-dimensional (2D) signals, 2D discrete wavelet transforms (2D-DWT) are used to extract the features. The features are extracted by using the wavelet families such as Daubechies, Biorthogonal, Symlets, Coiflets and Fejer-Korovkin in 2D-DWT to analyze PQ disturbances. Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier determine the feature subsets. Then, WOA and k nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier are used to determine the feature group. By using KNN and Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifi-cation methods, Classifier models that distinguish PQ disturbances are formed. The main aim of the study is to determine the features derived from 2D wavelet coefficients for different wavelet families and to determine which of them has a better classification performance to distinguish PQ disturbances signals. At the same time, different classification methods are simulated and a model which can classify PQ disturbances signals with high performance is created. Also, the generated models are analysed for their performance in terms of different noise levels (40 dB, 30 dB, 20 dB). The result of this simulation study shows that the model developed to classify PQ disturbances is superior to conventional models and other 2D signal processing methods in the literature. In addition, it was concluded that the proposed method can cope better with noisy signals by low computational complexity and higher classification rate.