Enhanced prediction model of short-term sea surface wind speed: A multiscale feature extraction and selection approach coupled with deep learning technique

Accurate prediction of short-term sea surface wind speed is essential for maritime safety and coastal management. Most conventional studies encounter challenges simply in analyzing raw wind speed sequences and extracting multiscale features directly from the original received data, which result in lower efficiency. In this paper, an enhanced hybrid model based on a novel data assemble method for original received data, a multiscale feature extraction and selection approach, and a predictive network, is proposed for accurate and efficient short-term sea surface wind speed forecasting. Firstly, the received original data including wind speed are assembled into correlation matrices in order to uncover inherent associations over varied time spans. Secondly a novel Multiscale Wind-speed Feature-Enhanced Convolutional Network (MW-FECN) is designed for efficient and selective multiscale feature extraction, which can capture comprehensive characteristics. Thirdly, a Random Forest Feature Selection (RF-FS) is employed to pinpoint crucial characteristics for enhanced prediction of wind speed with higher efficiency than the related works. Finally, the proposed hybrid model utilized a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network to achieve the accurate prediction of wind speed. Experimental data are collected in Weihai sea area, and a case study consist of five benchmarks and three ablation models is conducted to assess the proposed hybrid model. Compared with the conventional methods, experiment results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid model and demonstrate effective balancing prediction accuracy and computational time. The proposed hybrid model achieves up to a 28.45% MAE and 27.27% RMSE improvement over existing hybrid models.