Predicting the Evolution of Capacity Degradation Histograms of Rechargeable Batteries Under Dynamic Loads via Latent Gaussian Processes

Accurate prediction of lithium-ion battery capacity degradation under dynamic loads is crucial yet challenging due to limited data availability and high cell-to-cell variability. This study proposes a Latent Gaussian Process (GP) model to forecast the full distribution of capacity fade in the form of high-dimensional histograms, rather than relying on point estimates. The model integrates Principal Component Analysis with GP regression to learn temporal degradation patterns from partial early-cycle data of a target cell, using a fully degraded reference cell. Experiments on the NASA dataset with randomized dynamic load profiles demonstrate that Latent GP enables full-lifecycle capacity distribution prediction using only early-cycle observations. Compared with standard GP, long short-term memory (LSTM), and Monte Carlo Dropout LSTM baselines, it achieves superior accuracy in terms of Kullback–Leibler divergence and mean squared error. Sensitivity analyses further confirm the model’s robustness to input noise and hyperparameter settings, highlighting its potential for practical deployment in real-world battery health prognostics.