Solar Radiation Prediction using Ant Colony Optimization and Artificial Neural Network

This paper proposes a Solar Radiation Prediction Model employing Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN), named as SRPM. SRPM aims to incorporate the Feature Selection (FS) technique in the ANN training with the guidance of hybridizing ACO. The main reason behind using FS technique is, it can provide an improved solution from a particular problem by identifying the most salient features from the available feature set. In SRPM, the hybridizing ACO search technique utilizes the information gathered from the correlation among the features and the result of ANN training. To assist the ACO search, pheromone updating technique and measurement of heuristic information have been performed by two particular sets of rules. Thus, SRPM utilizes the benefits of using the wrapper and filter approaches in selecting the salient features during SRP task. The combination eventually creates an equipoise between exploration and exploitation of ants in the way of searching as well as strengthening the capability of global search of ACO for obtaining well qualified solution in SRPM. To evaluate the executive efficiency of SRPM, data samples were collected from BMD and NASA-SSE department. Exploratory outcomes show that SRP can select six utmost salient features by providing 99.74% and 99.78% averaged testing accuracies for BMD and NASA-SSE data samples that are composed of 12 and 15 original features, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed model successfully obtained 0.26% and 0.22% MAPE for BMD and NASA-SSE data samples, respectively with a high correlation of about 99.97% within the actual and predicted data.