A Novel Approach to Enhance the Generalization Capability of the Hourly Solar Diffuse Horizontal Irradiance Models on Diverse Climates

Raghuram Kalyanam and Sabine Hoffmann
Additional contact information
Raghuram Kalyanam: Chair of Built Environment, Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Kaiserslautern, Paul-Ehrlich-Str. 14, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
Sabine Hoffmann: Chair of Built Environment, Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Kaiserslautern, Paul-Ehrlich-Str. 14, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 18, 1-16

Abstract: Solar radiation data is essential for the development of many solar energy applications ranging from thermal collectors to building simulation tools, but its availability is limited, especially the diffuse radiation component. There are several studies aimed at predicting this value, but very few studies cover the generalizability of such models on varying climates. Our study investigates how well these models generalize and also show how to enhance their generalizability on different climates. Since machine learning approaches are known to generalize well, we apply them to truly understand how well they perform on different climates than they are originally trained. Therefore, we trained them on datasets from the U.S. and tested on several European climates. The machine learning model that is developed for U.S. climates not only showed low mean absolute error (MAE) of 23 W/m 2 , but also generalized very well on European climates with MAE in the range of 20 to 27 W/m 2 . Further investigation into the factors influencing the generalizability revealed that careful selection of the training data can improve the results significantly.

Keywords: diffuse horizontal irradiance; global solar irradiance; diffuse fraction; neural network; XGBoost; random forests; gradient boosting; machine learning model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/18/4868/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/18/4868/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:13:y:2020:i:18:p:4868-:d:415092

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().