Soft Computing Methods with Phase Space Reconstruction for Wind Speed Forecasting—A Performance Comparison

This article presents a comparison of wind speed forecasting techniques, starting with the Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average, followed by Artificial Intelligence-based techniques. The objective of this article is to compare these methods and provide readers with an idea of what method(s) to apply to solve their forecasting needs. The Artificial Intelligence-based techniques included in the comparison are Nearest Neighbors (the original method, and a version tuned by Differential Evolution), Fuzzy Forecasting, Artificial Neural Networks (designed and tuned by Genetic Algorithms), and Genetic Programming. These techniques were tested against twenty wind speed time series, obtained from Russian and Mexican weather stations, predicting the wind speed for 10 days, one day at a time. The results show that Nearest Neighbors using Differential Evolution outperforms the other methods. An idea this article delivers to the reader is: what part of the history of the time series to use as input to a forecaster? This question is answered by the reconstruction of phase space. Reconstruction methods approximate the phase space from the available data, yielding m (the system's dimension) and tau (the sub-sampling constant), which can be used to determine the input for the different forecasting methods.