Explainable machine learning techniques based on attention gate recurrent unit and local interpretable model-agnostic explanations for multivariate wind speed forecasting

Wind power has emerged as a successful component within power systems. The ability to reliably and accurately forecast wind speed is of great importance in maintaining the security and stability of the power grid. However, the significance of explaining prediction models has often been overlooked by researchers. To address this gap, this study introduces a novel approach to wind speed forecasting that incorporates a significant decomposition method, attention-based machine learning, and local explanation techniques. The proposed model utilizes grid search variational mode decomposition to decompose the wind speed sequence into different modes while employing gate recurrent unit with an attention mechanism to achieve superior forecasting performance. Experimental evaluations conducted on eight real-world wind speed datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms other popular models across multiple performance criteria. In two specific experiments, the proposed approach achieved a minimal mean absolute percentage error of 2.74% and 1.70%, respectively. Furthermore, local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) were employed to assess the influence of factors, highlighting whether they positively or negatively affected the predicted values.