DynamicNet: A time-variant ODE network for multi-step wind speed prediction

Wind power is a new type of green energy. Though it is economical to access and gather such energy, effectively matching the energy with consumers' demand is difficult, because of the fluctuate, intermittent and chaotic nature of wind speed. Hence, multi-step wind speed prediction becomes an important research topic. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning method, DyanmicNet, for the problem. DynamicNet follows an encoder-decoder framework. To capture the fluctuate, intermittent and chaotic nature of wind speed, it leverages a time-variant structure to build the decoder, which is different from conventional encoder-decoder methods. In addition, a new neural block (ST-GRU-ODE) is developed, which can model the wind speed in a continuous manner by using the neural ordinary differential equation (ODE). To enhance the prediction performance, a multi-step training procedure is also put forward. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on two real-world datasets, where wind speed is recorded in the form of two orthogonal components namely U-Wind and V-Wind. Each component can be illustrated as wind speed images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art techniques.