Combined VMD-SVM based feature selection method for classification of power quality events

• Different types of power quality disturbances are discriminated from each other.
• VMD and ST are used for extraction of dominant features.
• SVM with simple structure and few adjustable parameters is used as the classifier core.
• The generalization capability and detection accuracy of the proposed method are increased by elimination of redundant features by using different feature selection methods.
• The start and end points of PQ events can be detected accurately.

Power quality (PQ) issues have become more important than before due to increased use of sensitive electrical loads. In this paper, a new hybrid algorithm is presented for PQ disturbances detection in electrical power systems. The proposed method is constructed based on four main steps: simulation of PQ events, extraction of features, selection of dominant features, and classification of selected features. By using two powerful signal processing tools, i.e. variational mode decomposition (VMD) and S-transform (ST), some potential features are extracted from different PQ events. VMD as a new tool decomposes signals into different modes and ST also analyzes signals in both time and frequency domains. In order to avoid large dimension of feature vector and obtain a detection scheme with optimum structure, sequential forward selection (SFS) and sequential backward selection (SBS) as wrapper based methods and Gram–Schmidt orthogonalization (GSO) based feature selection method as filter based method are used for elimination of redundant features. In the next step, PQ events are discriminated by support vector machines (SVMs) as classifier core. Obtained results of the extensive tests prove the satisfactory performance of the proposed method in terms of speed and accuracy even in noisy conditions. Moreover, the start and end points of PQ events can be detected with high precision.

The proposed power quality detection scheme.Figure optionsDownload as PowerPoint slide