Date of Award
5-2018
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering (MSME)
Department
Mechanical Engineering
Committee Chair
Guang Lin
Committee Member 1
Ilias Bilionis
Committee Member 2
Carlo Scalo
Abstract
Solar energy forecasting plays an important role in both solar power plants and electricity grid. The effective forecasting is essential for efficient usage and management of the electricity grid, as well as for the solar energy trading. However, many of the existing models or algorithms are based on real physical laws, where tons of calculations, step-by-step modification, and many inputs are required. In this research, a novel deep Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) based regression approach for predicting solar energy is proposed, in which the inputs are only ensemble weather forecasting data. The results demonstrate that our proposed deep Multi-layer Perceptron based regression approach for solar energy forecasting is efficient as well as accurate enough. A Sobol sensitivity analysis is performed over the trained model, determining the most important variables in the weather forecasting model data. The first-order and the total order Sobol sensitivity indices for quantifying feature importance, are calculated for each model input parameter. With using the process of feature removal, the result of Sobol sensitivity analysis is verified.
Recommended Citation
Sun, Yixuan, "Deep Neural Network Regression and Sobol Sensitivity Analysis for Daily Solar Energy Prediction Given Weather Data" (2018). Open Access Theses. 1460.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_theses/1460