Forecasting wind speed using empirical mode decomposition and Elman neural network

• A novel EMD–ENN model is proposed to forecast wind speed.
• In EMD–ENN, the EMD is adopted to decompose the original data.
• In EMD–ENN, the ENN is used to build the prediction models for each sub-series.
• Four datasets of wind speed are used to demonstrate the proposed approach.
• It is concluded that the proposed approach can improve the prediction accuracy and is very effective.

Because of the chaotic nature and intrinsic complexity of wind speed, it is difficult to describe the moving tendency of wind speed and accurately forecast it. In our study, a novel EMD–ENN approach, a hybrid of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Elman neural network (ENN), is proposed to forecast wind speed. First, the original wind speed datasets are decomposed into a collection of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residue by EMD, yielding relatively stationary sub-series that can be readily modeled by neural networks. Second, both IMF components and residue are applied to establish the corresponding ENN models. Then, each sub-series is predicted using the corresponding ENN. Finally, the prediction values of the original wind speed datasets are calculated by the sum of the forecasting values of every sub-series. Moreover, in the ENN modeling process, the neuron number of the input layer is determined by a partial autocorrelation function. Four prediction cases of wind speed are used to test the performance of the proposed hybrid approach. Compared with the persistent model, back-propagation neural network, and ENN, the simulation results show that the proposed EMD–ENN model consistently has the minimum statistical error of the mean absolute error, mean square error, and mean absolute percentage error. Thus, it is concluded that the proposed approach is suitable for wind speed prediction.

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