Hyper-parametric improved machine learning models for solar radiation forecasting

Spatiotemporal solar radiation forecasting is extremely challenging due to its dependence on metrological and environmental factors. Chaotic time-varying and non-linearity make the forecasting model more complex. To cater this crucial issue, the paper provides a comprehensive investigation of the deep learning framework for the prediction of the two components of solar irradiation, that is, Diffuse Horizontal Irradiance (DHI) and Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI). Through exploratory data analysis the three recent most prominent deep learning (DL) architecture have been developed and compared with the other classical machine learning (ML) models in terms of the statistical performance accuracy. In our study, DL architecture includes convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) whereas classical ML models include Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN). Additionally, three optimization techniques Grid Search (GS), Random Search (RS), and Bayesian Optimization (BO) have been incorporated for tuning the hyper parameters of the classical ML models to obtain the best results. Based on the rigorous comparative analysis it was found that the CNN model has outperformed all classical machine learning and DL models having lowest mean squared error and highest R-Squared value with least computational time.