Multi-step wind speed forecasting synergistically using generalized S-transform and improved grey wolf optimizer

A reliable wind speed forecasting method is crucial for the applications in wind engineering. In this study, the generalized S-transform (GST) is innovatively applied for wind speed forecasting to uncover the time-frequency characteristics in the non-stationary wind speed data. The improved grey wolf optimizer (IGWO) is employed to optimize the adjustable parameters of GST to obtain the best time-frequency resolution. Then a hybrid method based on IGWO-optimized GST is proposed to validate the effectiveness and superiority for multi-step non-stationary wind speed forecasting. The historical wind speed is chosen as the first input feature, while the dynamic time-frequency characteristics obtained by IGWO-optimized GST are chosen as the second input feature. Comparative experiment with six competitors is conducted to demonstrate the best performance of the proposed method in terms of prediction accuracy and stability. The superiority of the GST compared to other time-frequency analysis methods is also discussed by another experiment. It can be concluded that the introduction of IGWOoptimized GST can deeply exploit the time-frequency characteristics and effectively improving the prediction accuracy