Generation of daily global solar irradiation with support vector machines for regression

•New methodology for estimation of daily solar irradiation with SVR.•Automatic procedure for training models and selecting meteorological features.•This methodology outperforms other well-known parametric and numeric techniques.

Solar global irradiation is barely recorded in isolated rural areas around the world. Traditionally, solar resource estimation has been performed using parametric-empirical models based on the relationship of solar irradiation with other atmospheric and commonly measured variables, such as temperatures, rainfall, and sunshine duration, achieving a relatively high level of certainty. Considerable improvement in soft-computing techniques, which have been applied extensively in many research fields, has lead to improvements in solar global irradiation modeling, although most of these techniques lack spatial generalization.This new methodology proposes support vector machines for regression with optimized variable selection via genetic algorithms to generate non-locally dependent and accurate models. A case of study in Spain has demonstrated the value of this methodology. It achieved a striking reduction in the mean absolute error (MAE) – 41.4% and 19.9% – as compared to classic parametric models; Bristow & Campbell and Antonanzas-Torres et al., respectively.