Pattern recognition based photovoltaic power forecast
using generalized regression neural network
Jiao Liu Lingxiao Wang
College of Electrical Engineering College of Electrical Engineering College of Electrical Engineering
Zhejiang University Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, China Hangzhou, China
liujiaoliuliu@163.com wanglingxiao@zju.edu.cn
Wenjun Yan
College of Electrical Engineering
Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, China
yanwenjun@zju.edu.cn
Abstract—In the past decade, solar energy occupies an
increasing share of the power grid. The intermittent fluctuations
characteristics of solar irradiance bring great difficulties and
challenges to the power system management and dispatch which
simultaneously makes photovoltaic power forecast the most
important. For this reason, pattern recognition model for
weather statuses is constructed, classification forecast approach
is put forward after the comparison of different power forecast
models based on the Generalized Regression Neural Network. In
order to assure the reliability of the result, the cross validation
which is used to obtain the optimal value of spread and
normalization of data is introduced into the forecast model. The
Generalized Regression Neural Network model implemented its
performance for photovoltaic power forecast has been studied
through a set of simulation experiments for different scenarios.
The comparisons of numerical results demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed model.
Keywords—Generalized Regression Neural Network, pattern
recognition, photovoltaic power forecast, Neural Network
I. INTRODUCTION
In the case of rapid growth of energy demand and the
deteriorating environment, it is necessary to develop renewable
energy resources, e.g. wind and solar, in order to pursuit the
low-carbon economy. As a typical renewable energy source,
solar photovoltaic (PV) energy has developed rapidly in recent
years. Due to the intermittent fluctuations characteristics of
solar irradiance, the grid-connection of the PV plants will bring
great challenges and difficulties to the power system dispatch
and management. How to consume the solar energy under the
stability and reliable constraints become the one of the key
focuses in the area of renewable energy source. Therefore,
photovoltaic power forecast becomes particularly important.
To obtain accuracy solar irradiance affected by many
atmospheric parameters such as temperature, relative humidity,
wind speed, research on the photovoltaic power forecast is of
great value. In recent decades, the power forecast has gained
great progress in various aspects.
Firstly, the feature parameter considered in the photovoltaic
power forecast is more adequate and not the same as before. In
XXX-X-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/$XX.00 ©20XX IEEE
‹,((( 
Xiaogang Guo Qiang Yang
College of Electrical Engineering
Zhejiang University Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, China Hangzhou, China
go@zju.edu.cn qyang@zju.edu.cn
1995, Cote proposed a new approach for feature tracking on
sequential satellite sensor images using neural networks after
realized cloud is the main factor that affect the solar irradiance
for the first time [1]. Lately, Bahner adopted a new functional
analytic approach to derive displacement vector fields from
satellite image sequences [2]. Subsequently, a large amount of
literature about cloud estimation has been published based on
various algorithms [3] such as Bayesian [4~5] and Heliosat [6].
In [7], photovoltaic power is calculated by the formula and
output of forecast system of which input is solar irradiance,
temperature, pressure, relative humidity and time, namely
illumination intensity. Then the accuracy of the model to which
the date and temperature introduced has greatly improved [8].
Secondly, photovoltaic power forecast model which is
categorized into two classes: physical methods and statistical
methods applied in the photovoltaic power forecast has
changed greatly. One of the most available solutions for power
generation forecast is neural networks because of its ability to
handle non-linearity effectively and to extract patterns
efficiently [9]. Neural networks can directly predict the
photovoltaic power by using the historical time sequence of
solar irradiance and photovoltaic power. Moreover, it can
spontaneously adjust to the location of photovoltaic power
plants.
Back Propagation neural networks (BP) is applied in [10]
to predict photovoltaic power by predicted insolation; A data
filtering technique based on wavelet transform (WT) and
generalized regression neural network (GRNN) is presented in
[11] to forecast short-term output power of a PV system; In
[12], the paper determine time horizon having the highest
representative for generated electricity prediction; A
photovoltaic system output forecast model based on the SVM
regression method has been established in [13]; Furthermore, a
new methodology based on support vector machines and on the
use of several numerically predicted weather variables,
including cloudiness [14]. In 2011, Chen C proposed an online
24-h solar power forecasting based on weather type
classification using artificial neural network [15]; Grey and
neural network (grey-NN) hybrid model is applied in [16] to
forecast the short-term output power of PV.
 The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section II
gives a brief introduction of artificial neural networks and
generalized regression neural networks; Section III presents
primary steps of work flow for photovoltaic power forecast; To
assess the performances of proposed models, the data of
photovoltaic plant is used. The results of models are compared
with back propagation neural networks in Section IV; finally
the conclusive remarks are given in Section V.
II. GENERALIZED REGRESSION NEURAL NETWORK
A. Artificial Neural Networks
Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), also called Neural
Network (NN), is an intelligent system model that imitates the
human brain's composition, structure, nerve connection, mode
of thinking and mechanism of activity to achieve parallel
processing, self-learning and nonlinear hint. ANN is applied
for various forecasting region such as electricity price
forecasting, wind speed and wind power forecasting [17~18].
An ANN is based on a collection of connected units called
artificial neurons. The connections between neurons provide
access for signals travel from the first (input) layer to the last
(output) layer, possibly after traversing the layers multiple
times. Typically, neurons are organized in layers. Different
layers may perform different kinds of transformations on their
inputs. The most ANN has three layers: input, output and
hidden layers [19]. Among them, the hidden layer can be one
layer or multiple layers.
According to the connection mode of neuron, neural
network can be divided into forward network, feedback
network, mutual bonding network and hybrid network. The
common neural networks are Back Propagation neural
networks (BP) [20], Feed Forward Neural Networks (FFNN)
and Generalized Regression Neural Networks (GRNN)
[21~22].
B. Generalized Regression Neural Networks
Generalized Regression Neural Networks (GRNN) is
proposed by D.F. Specht In 1991 [23]. It is a kind of Radical
Basis neural networks (RBF). It is composed of four layers
which are input layer, pattern layer, summation layer and
output layer as shown in Fig. 1.
[
S
6$
1
\
1
[
S
6'
2
\N
2 1
[L
SG
6'
O
Fig. 1. Model structural diagram of GRNN

The input layer receives information from input vectors
and directly transmits them to pattern layer. Moreover, the
amount of neurons in input layer is equal to the dimension of
the input vectors in the learning sample.
The number of neurons is equal to the number of learning
sample. The pattern Gaussian function of is expressed as (1)
( x − xi )T ( x − xi )
−
pd = e 2σ 2
(1)
where σ denotes the smoothing parameter.
There are two kinds of summation in the summation layer.
One is mathematical summation, namely SS , and the other is
weighted summation, namely SW . The functions can be
represented as (2) and (3) [24].
SS = ¦ pd (2)
d =1
SW = ¦ wd pd (3)
d =1
Where wd is the weight of pattern neuron i connected to
the summation layer. As for output layer, the number of
neurons is equal to the number of output vectors y . The main
function of GRNN model can be expressed as (4)
∞
³ Yf (Y , X )dX
E ª¬Y X º¼ = −∞
∞
(4)
³ f (Y , X )dX
−∞
Where X is a i dimensional input vector, Y is the
prediction of GRNN. f (Y , X ) is the joint probability density
function of X and Y . The E ª¬Y X º¼ is the expected value of
Y while the input vector X is given.
In view of this, the GRNN has only one parameter σ that
needs to be determined. Therefore, we should develop an
automatically efficiently mean for selecting the appropriate
parameter σ .
With strong nonlinear mapping ability and flexible
network structure, as well as high fault tolerance and
robustness, GRNN is suitable for solving nonlinear problems.
And it has been widely applied to various fields including
regression, prediction, and classification, such as short-term
load forecasting [25], prediction of scour depth around bridge
piers [26], modelling river sediment yield [27], and so on.
III. PHOTOVOLTAIC POWER FORECAST MODEL
The block diagram of Generalized Regression Neural
Network for photovoltaic power forecast based on pattern
recognition is shown in Fig. 2.
A. The Selection of Forecast Factor
The photovoltaic power is affected by multiple weather
factors, such as solar irradiance, environmental temperature,
relative humidity, wind speed and so on. The forecast accuracy
is related to the weather types[28~29]. The classification of
weather statuses presented by those literatures can effectively
simplify model and improve the model accuracy. Moreover,
Feature Parameter-solar irradiance
there are three aspects that should be considered in the 1000
selection of forecast factor. Firstly, we’d better take full use of

value
500
available data that we can get easily; then, the redundancy
0
between the selected feature parameter should be avoided; last 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180
but not least, the dimension of the input vector needs to be sample
Feature Parameter-temperature
controlled in available range. 40

value
Start 20
0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180
Historical data sample
Feature Parameter-humidity
100
Training

value
Pre-processing process
50
0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180
Normalization sample

Pattern recognization Fig. 3. The values of feature parameters

Photovoltaic Power
Five typical atmosphere 3500

3000
Case 1 Case 2 Case 3 Case 4 Case 5
2500
power(w)

2000
Get data Prediction
1500

1000
Train part Test part
500
Cross validation
0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180
N sample
Minimum
error Fig. 4. Power generation of PV plant
Y
In this article, taking actual condition and the relevance
between meteorological parameters into consideration, we
Get the best value of spread choose solar irradiance, relative humidity and environmental
temperature as the feature parameter that reflecting weather
status characteristic.
Generalized regression neural network
B. Normalization of Data
Prediction result In hidden layer, the nonlinear activation function of
neurons is function whose value range is [ 0,1] or [ −1,1] . The
End historical data with variation range will far beyond the range.
Moreover, the utilization of historical data without
Fig. 2. Block diagram of classification forecast method pretreatment will lead to neuronal saturation. To obtain
available and reliable forecast results, historical data is
Taking the historical data of a photovoltaic power station in normalized as followed (5).
Taizhou as an example, solar irradiance, relative humidity and
x − xmin
environmental temperature are shown in Fig. 2, respectively, y = ymin + ( ymax − ymin ) (4)
corresponding to the solar irradiance of PV plant represented xmax − xmin
by Fig. 3.
where x is primary data, and x ∈ [ xmin , xmax ] ; y is
normalized data, and y ∈ [ ymin , ymax ] .


C. Pattern Recognition
There are significant differences between the map relations
fitted through PV power forecast model under different
weather statuses, and it is very difficult to forecast the power
accuracy in a variety of weather statuses. Besides, the historical
data corresponding to different weather statuses are imbalance,
so the accuracy of the power forecast model trained by those
data may not be so perfect.
According to the GB/T22164-2008, the weather statuses
are divided into many kinds. The most typical atmosphere are
sunny, cloudy, rain, shower and snow. Accounted for this, all
the historical weather data will be divided into five parts and
trained the corresponding model.
D. Cross Validation
To get reliable model, cross validation is adopted in the
process of parameter optimization. Firstly, the sample is
divided into train part which will later be divided equally to k
subsets and test part. The average value of k error got from the
trained model will be the evaluation criteria. Otherwise, the
loop is applied to acquire the optimal spread.
In generally, 3 ≤ k ≤ N , and N is the number of sample.
The daily sample data from March to April 2015 including
hourly solar irradiance, temperature, atmosphere type and
power was collected from 7:00 to 18:00.
B. Simulation Result
According to the five type of atmosphere mentioned in
section II, the historical data including solar irradiance, relative
humidity and so on will be classified to five parts. For each sub
model, the normalization of the data will be the first step. After
this step, the data is divided into k groups and the cross
validate is done to calculate the value of the spread. In this
simulation, the spread is found to be 0.3. Besides, photovoltaic
power forecast model will be trained by different data
corresponding to five types of atmosphere which covers all
atmosphere type.
In order to verify the accuracy of the proposed model for
photovoltaic power forecast, the result is compared with the
Back Propagation neural networks (BP). The prediction
performance of GRNN and BP are presented in Fig 5 and Fig 6,
respectively.
GRNN output
3000
Forecast
output(w)

2000 Actual output

Put all of this together, in this article, k = 8 .
1000

IV. SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS 0

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55
sample
A. Historical Data GRNN prediction error percentage

To validate the Generalized Regression Neural Network for 0

deviation(%)

photovoltaic power forecast based on pattern recognition in

MATLAB, the historical data of 4kw photovoltaic system at -2
the Taizhou Research institute of Zhejiang University is
-4
selected as sample. Some of the historical data are shown in
Table 1. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55
sample

TABLE I. HISTORICAL DATA Fig. 5. The Simulation result of GRNN

Relative Atmosphere
Time Power Irradiance Temperature BP output
humidity type 10000
8:30 1134 334 18.7 45.0 sunny Forecast
output(w)

sunny 5000 Actual output

9:00 2162 502 19.0 42.6
9:30 2480 522 19.9 39.6 sunny
0
10:00 2884 722 20.2 39.7 sunny
10:30 2896 736 20.3 37.9 sunny -5000
0 10 20 30 40 50
11:00 2848 716 21.1 33.3 sunny sample
sunny BP prediction error percentage
11:30 2832 701 22.0 33.7 20
12:00 2812 696 22.5 31.7 sunny
deviation(%)

10
12:30 2808 695 24.0 31.6 sunny
sunny 0
13:00 2704 855 28.0 22.3
13:30 2518 762 31.0 19.1 sunny -10

14:00 2124 561 26.3 26.8 sunny -20

0 10 20 30 40 50
14:30 1678 402 25.1 27.4 sunny sample
15:00 1526 310 24.4 33.7 sunny
sunny Fig. 6. The Simulation result of BP
15:30 1494 302 26.2 34.3
16:00 766 129 22.5 42.4 sunny
In each figure, the first subplot is the output of actual and
16:30 346 9403 21.9 45.2 sunny
forecast; the second subplot is the error percentage of
17:00 172 40.0 21.4 45.9 sunny
prediction. As depicted in the picture, the GRNN error


percentage is less than the error percentage of BP. The
comparison of error percentage is shown in Table 2
TABLE II. COMPARISON OF PERCENTAGE ERROR
Average The error The error
Approach Max error Min error
error >5% >10%
GRNN 4.3089% 0.0060% 0.4014% 0 0
BP 20.9375% 0.0341% 1.1911% 1 1
It can be seen from the result given in Table II that the
performance of GRNN is better than the BP.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The photovoltaic power forecast plays an important role in
the development of solar power generation industry. The
essence of prediction is to establish the mapping relation
between power generation and the historical data, such as solar
irradiance, relative humidity and so forth. In this paper, the
pattern recognition model for different weather conditions is
constructed, and the classification forecast approach is put
forward after the comparison of different power forecast
models based on the Generalized Regression Neural Network.
The cross validation is used to obtain the optimal value of
spread and normalization of data and integrated into the
forecast model. In the future work, we will bring season which
have significant influence in the atmosphere into consideration
as much as possible, and the proposed model can be further
optimized.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (51777183), the Natural Science
Foundation of Zhejiang Province (LZ15E070001), and the
Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province
(BK20161142).
REFERENCES
[1] S. Cote, A.R.L. Tatnall. A neural network-based method for tracking
features from satellite sensor images[J]. International Journal of Remote
Sensing, 2007, 16(18):3695-3701.
[2] L. BANNEHR, M. ROHN, G. WARNECKE. A functional analytic
method to derive displacement vector fields from satellite image
sequences[J]. Int. J. Remote Sensing, 1996, 17(2):383-392.
[3] Hammer A, Heinemann D, Lorenz E, et al. Short-term forecasting of
solar radiation: a statistical approach using satellite data[J]. Solar
Energy, 1999, 67(1–3):139-150.
[4] Konrad, Janusz, Dubois, et al. Bayesian Estimation of Motion Vector
Fields[J]. IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence,
1992, 14(9):910-927.
[5] Fazio A R D, Bracale A, Caramia P, et al. A Bayesian-based Approach
for Photovoltaic Power Forecast in Smart Grids[C]// Cigrè International
Symposium. 2011.
[6] Hammer A, Heinemann D, Hoyer C, et al. Solar energy assessment
using remote sensing technologies[J]. Remote Sensing of Environment,
2003, 86(3):423-432.
[7] Ammar M B, Chaabene M, Elhajjaji A. Daily energy planning of a
household photovoltaic panel[J]. Applied Energy, 2010, 87(7):2340-
2351.
[8] Fei W, Mi Z, Zhang C. A practical model for single-step power
prediction of grid-connected PV plant using artificial neural
network[C]// Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Asia. IEEE, 2011:1-4.

[9] A. Haque, P. Mandal, J. Meng, M. Kaye, and L. Chang, "A new strategy
for wind speed forecasting using hybrid intelligent models," in Electrical
and Computer Engineering (CCECE), 2012 25th Canadian Conference
on, Apr.-May 2012.
[10] Yona A, Senjyu T, Funabashi T. Application of Recurrent Neural
Network to Short-Term-Ahead Generating Power Forecasting for
Photovoltaic System[C]// Power Engineering Society General Meeting.
IEEE, 2007:1-6.
[11] Mandal P, Haque A U, Madhira S T S, et al. Applying wavelets to
predict solar PV output power using generalized regression neural
network[C]// North American Power Symposium. IEEE, 2013:1-5.
[12] øzgi E, Öztopal A, Yerli B, et al. Short–mid-term solar power prediction
by using artificial neural networks[J]. Solar Energy, 2012, 86(2):725-
733.
[13] Li R, Li G. Photovoltaic power generation output forecasting based on
support vector machine regression technique[J]. Electric Power, 2008.
[14] Jr J G D S F, Oozeki T, Takashima T, et al. Use of support vector
regression and numerically predicted cloudiness to forecast power
output of a photovoltaic power plant in Kitakyushu, Japan[J]. Progress
in Photovoltaics Research & Applications, 2012, 20(7):874–882.
[15] Chen C, Duan S, Cai T, et al. Online 24-h solar power forecasting based
on weather type classification using artificial neural network[J]. Solar
Energy, 2011, 85(11):2856-2870.
[16] Wang S, Zhang N. Short-term output power forecast of photovoltaic
based on a grey and neural network hybrid model[J]. Automation of
Electric Power Systems, 2012, 36(19):37-41.
[17] N. Amjady, A. Daraeepour, and F. Keynia, "Day-Ahead electricity price
forecasting by modified relief algorithm and hybrid neural network,"
Generation, Transmission, &Distribution, IET, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 432-44,
2010.
[18] J. Zhou, J. Shi, and G. Li, "Fine tuning support vector machines for
short-term wind speed forecasting," Energy Conversion and
Management, vol. 52, no. 4, pp.1990-8, 2011.
[19] Kumar A R S, Sudheer K P, Jain S K, et al. Rainfall-runoff modelling
using artificial neural networks: comparison of network types[J].
Hydrological Processes, 2005, 19(6):1277–1291.
[20] Mcclelland J L, Rumelhart D E. Explorations in parallel distributed
processing: a handbook of models, programs, and exercises[M]. MIT
Press, 1988.
[21] Cigizoglu H K. Estimation and forecasting of daily suspended sediment
data by multi-layer perceptrons[J]. Advances in Water Resources, 2004,
27(2):185-195.
[22] Cigizoglu H K, Alp M. Generalized regression neural network in
modelling river sediment yield[J]. Advances in Engineering Software,
2006, 37(2):63-68.
[23] D. F. Specht. A general regression neural network. IEEE Trans Neural
Network, 2(6)(1991), pp. 568-576.
[24] Li H Z, Guo S, Li C J, et al. A hybrid annual power load forecasting
model based on generalized regression neural network with fruit fly
optimization algorithm[J]. Knowledge-Based Systems, 2013, 37(2):378-
387.
[25] Xia C, Lei B, Wang H, et al. GRNN short-term load forecasting model
and virtual instrument design[J]. Energy Procedia, 2011, 13:9150-9158.
[26] Firat M, Gungor M. Generalized Regression Neural Networks and Feed
Forward Neural Networks for prediction of scour depth around bridge
piers[J]. Advances in Engineering Software, 2009, 40(8):731-737.
[27] Cigizoglu H K, Alp M. Generalized regression neural network in
modelling river sediment yield[J]. Advances in Engineering Software,
2006, 37(2):63-68.
[28] Meral M E, Dinçer F. A review of the factors affecting operation and
efficiency of photovoltaic based electricity generation systems[J].
Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2011, 15(5):2176-2184.
[29] Chel A, Tiwari G N. A case study of a typical 2.32 kW stand-alone
photovoltaic (SAPV) in composite climate of New Delhi (India)[J].
Applied Energy, 2011, 88(4):1415-1426.