Offshore wind power output prediction based on convolutional attention mechanism

To solve the problem that offshore wind power generation is susceptible to extreme weather conditions that result in low accuracy of monitoring data, this work proposes a method for predicting offshore wind power generation output by combining convolution and attention mechanisms. The method combines bidirectional long and short-term memory (BiLSTM) network with attention mechanism (AM). The input data are first weighted with the AM for reducing the predictive weight of the interference data, and then the attention mechanism-weighted data are fed into the BiLSTM network. The bi-directional propagation neural network can effectively utilize all the input information, resulting in higher prediction accuracy. The method of combining BiLSTM network with AM is compared with the method employing long and short-term memory network, gated recurrent unit, and bidirectional long and short-term memory network alone through simulation. The mean square error (MSE) of the BiLSTM combined with AM method is 41.28% smaller than the MSE of the best LSTM method among the compared methods and 58.43% smaller than the average of the compared methods. The R2-R-Square is 14.21% larger than the R2-R-Square of the LSTM and 32.91% larger than the average of the compared methods. The results show that the proposed method of combining convolution and attention mechanism for offshore wind power generation output prediction has higher prediction accuracy.