A Gaussian mixture copula model based localized Gaussian process regression approach for long-term wind speed prediction

Optimizing wind power generation and controlling the operation of wind turbines to efficiently harness the renewable wind energy is a challenging task due to the intermittency and unpredictable nature of wind speed, which has significant influence on wind power production. A new approach for long-term wind speed forecasting is developed in this study by integrating GMCM (Gaussian mixture copula model) and localized GPR (Gaussian process regression). The time series of wind speed is first classified into multiple non-Gaussian components through the Gaussian mixture copula model and then Bayesian inference strategy is employed to incorporate the various non-Gaussian components using the posterior probabilities. Further, the localized Gaussian process regression models corresponding to different non-Gaussian components are built to characterize the stochastic uncertainty and non-stationary seasonality of the wind speed data. The various localized GPR models are integrated through the posterior probabilities as the weightings so that a global predictive model is developed for the prediction of wind speed. The proposed GMCM–GPR approach is demonstrated using wind speed data from various wind farm locations and compared against the GMCM-based ARIMA (auto-regressive integrated moving average) and SVR (support vector regression) methods. In contrast to GMCM–ARIMA and GMCM–SVR methods, the proposed GMCM–GPR model is able to well characterize the multi-seasonality and uncertainty of wind speed series for accurate long-term prediction. •A novel predictive modeling method is proposed for long-term wind speed forecasting.•Gaussian mixture copula model is estimated to characterize the multi-seasonality.•Localized Gaussian process regression models can deal with the random uncertainty.•Multiple GPR models are integrated through Bayesian inference strategy.•The proposed approach shows higher prediction accuracy and reliability.