Short-term prediction method of wind speed series based on fractal interpolation

•An improved fractal interpolation prediction method is proposed.•The chaos optimization algorithm is used to obtain the iterated function system.•The fractal extrapolate interpolation prediction of wind speed series is performed.

In order to improve the prediction performance of the wind speed series, the rescaled range analysis is used to analyze the fractal characteristics of the wind speed series. An improved fractal interpolation prediction method is proposed to predict the wind speed series whose Hurst exponents are close to 1. An optimization function which is composed of the interpolation error and the constraint items of the vertical scaling factors in the fractal interpolation iterated function system is designed. The chaos optimization algorithm is used to optimize the function to resolve the optimal vertical scaling factors. According to the self-similarity characteristic and the scale invariance, the fractal extrapolate interpolation prediction can be performed by extending the fractal characteristic from internal interval to external interval. Simulation results show that the fractal interpolation prediction method can get better prediction result than others for the wind speed series with the fractal characteristic, and the prediction performance of the proposed method can be improved further because the fractal characteristic of its iterated function system is similar to that of the predicted wind speed series.