A novel approach based on integration of convolutional neural networks and deep feature selection for short-term solar radiation forecasting

•Hybrid solar forecasting method exhibits generalized and improved performance.•Novel data preprocessing method constructs more distinguishing input data.•Deep feature extraction network obtains high-level features.•Experiments are verified in different weather conditions.•Integrated algorithms are used for feature selection and forecasting. In this study, a novel deep solar forecasting approach is proposed based on the complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN), continuous wavelet transform (CWT), feature extraction networks, RReliefF feature selection, and extreme learning machine (ELM). The global solar radiation is decomposed into mode functions with the CEEMDAN method. The CWT reconstructs one-dimensional data into two-dimensional scalogram images to include both frequency and the time of the daily and hourly correlations. For the feature extraction process, a cascade convolutional neural network architecture, which consists of AlexNet and GoogLeNet, was designed to extract distinctive deep features. As the high-performance features provide a high level of forecasting accuracy, these are concatenated as the subset feature vector and RReliefF utilized to rank and select the most distinctive features from the subset. The designed ELM is then trained with the selected features and the fully-trained ELM model is then used to evaluate the forecast performance. In the experiments, root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the proposed method were observed as 0.0642, 0.0241, and 0.1201 for one-step ahead, 0.0686, 0.0285, and 0.1279 for two-step ahead, and 0.0724, 0.0315, and 0.1317 for three-step ahead, respectively. The obtained results show that the proposed method exhibits accurate and robust forecasting performance and outperforms conventional regression models.