Wind speed is an essential component that needs to be determined accurately, especially over long‐term periods for various engineering and scientific purposes including renewable energy productions, structural building sustainability and others. In this study, six different heuristic methods: multi‐layer perceptron artificial neural networks, (ANN), adaptive neuro‐fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) with grid partition (GP), ANFIS with subtractive clustering (SC), generalized regression neural networks (GRNN), gene expression programming (GEP) and multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS) are developed to model monthly wind speeds using meteorological input information. The atmospheric pressure, temperature, relative humidity and rainfall values are obtained from Jolfa and Tabriz meteorological stations, Iran, and are used to build the proposed predictive models.. Different statistical indicators are computed to evaluate and comprehensively assess the performance of the six heuristic methods. Over the testing phase, the ANFIS‐GP and GRNN models are seen to exhibit the highest predictive performance for the Jolfa and Tabriz stations, respectively. That is, the maximum coefficient of determination are found to be 0.874, 0.858, 0.850, 0.849, 0.847 and 0.826, for the GRNN, ANFIS‐GP, ANFIS‐SC, ANN, GEP and MARS models, respectively, for Jolfa station, respectively, revealing the superiority of GRNN over the five counterpart models. The results show the generalization capability of the tested heuristic artificial intelligence techniques for both study stations, and therefore could be explored for windspeed prediction and various decisions made in regards to climate change studies.
