text: The energy output a photo voltaic(PV) panel is a function of solar irradiation and weather parameters like temperature and wind speed etc. A general measure for solar irradiation called Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI), customarily reported in Watt meter @math , is a generic indicator for this intermittent energy resource. An accurate prediction of GHI is necessary for reliable grid integration of the renewable as well as for power market trading. While some machine learning techniques are well introduced along with the traditional time-series forecasting techniques, deep-learning techniques remains less explored for the task at hand. In this paper we give deep learning models suitable for sequence to sequence prediction of GHI. The deep learning models are reported for short-term forecasting @math hour along with the state-of-the art techniques like Gradient Boosted Regression Trees(GBRT) and Feed Forward Neural Networks(FFNN). We have checked that spatio-temporal features like wind direction, wind speed and GHI of neighboring location improves the prediction accuracy of the deep learning models significantly. Among the various sequence-to-sequence encoder-decoder models LSTM performed superior, handling short-comings of the state-of-the-art techniques.
  @cite_24: 
  @cite_23: The aim of this paper is to present a deep neural network architecture and use it in time series weather prediction. It uses multi stacked LSTMs to map sequences of weather values of the same length. The final goal is to produce two types of models per city (for 9 cities in Morocco) to forecast 24 and 72 hours worth of weather data (for Temperature, Humidity and Wind Speed). Approximately 15 years (2000-2015) of hourly meteorological data was used to train the model. The results show that LSTM based neural networks are competitive with the traditional methods and can be considered a better alternative to forecast general weather conditions.
  @cite_13: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult learning tasks. Although DNNs work well whenever large labeled training sets are available, they cannot be used to map sequences to sequences. In this paper, we present a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure. Our method uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector. Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT-14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, where the LSTM's BLEU score was penalized on out-of-vocabulary words. Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences. For comparison, a phrase-based SMT system achieves a BLEU score of 33.3 on the same dataset. When we used the LSTM to rerank the 1000 hypotheses produced by the aforementioned SMT system, its BLEU score increases to 36.5, which is close to the previous state of the art. The LSTM also learned sensible phrase and sentence representations that are sensitive to word order and are relatively invariant to the active and the passive voice. Finally, we found that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences (but not target sentences) improved the LSTM's performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier.
  @cite_4: In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model called RNN Encoder-Decoder that consists of two recurrent neural networks (RNN). One RNN encodes a sequence of symbols into a fixed-length vector representation, and the other decodes the representation into another sequence of symbols. The encoder and decoder of the proposed model are jointly trained to maximize the conditional probability of a target sequence given a source sequence. The performance of a statistical machine translation system is empirically found to improve by using the conditional probabilities of phrase pairs computed by the RNN Encoder-Decoder as an additional feature in the existing log-linear model. Qualitatively, we show that the proposed model learns a semantically and syntactically meaningful representation of linguistic phrases.
summary: In deep learning encoder-decoder network using LSTM and RNN were first used for machine translation as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem, where length of the input and output sequence is not fixed. @cite_13 @cite_4 . However it was then applied to forecasting problems where the lengths were known, yet they are not reported to be used in solar irradiation forecasting so far. @cite_24 @cite_23 . In this paper we implement such model both with and without neighboring location.