The designing of solar thermal systems need accurate information on global solar radiation (GSR). In the present study, six machine learning models, for example, random forest, k‐nearest neighbors, Gaussian process regression, support vector machine, multilayer perception, and XGBoost, are developed for GSR prediction with only air temperature as input for different climatic zones of India. The performance of machine learning models is also compared with some well‐known empirical models. The results show that generally, the performance of the machine learning models is better than empirical models, though, for a few climatic zones, empirical models give a better prediction. The top‐performing models are k‐nearest neighbors and XGBoost. Thus, we highly recommend temperature‐based models to predict GSR in the regions of India where only air temperature data are available. The accurate information of future GSR can be easily obtained by combining future air temperature forecasts with KNN/XGBoost models. These models can be extremely helpful in designing solar thermal systems in those regions where solar radiation facility is not available.
For the various climatic zones of India, machine learning (ML) models are created in the current work to forecast monthly-average diffuse solar radiation (DSR). The long-term solar radiation data are taken from Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), Pune, provided for 21 cities that span all of India’s climatic zones. The diffusion coefficient and diffuse fraction are the two groups of ML models with dual input parameters (sunshine ratio and clearness index) that are built and compared (each category has seven models). To create ML models, two well-known ML techniques, random forest (RF) and k-nearest neighbours (KNN), are used. The proposed ML models are compared with well-known models that are found in the literature. The ML models are ranked according to their overall and within predictive power using the Global Performance Indicator (GPI). It is discovered that KNN models generally outperform RF models. The results reveal that in diffusion coefficient models perform well than diffuse fraction models. Moreover, functional form 2 is the best followed by form 6. The ML models created here can be effectively used to accurately forecast DSR in various climates.
Machine learning (ML) models were developed to estimate monthly average diffuse solar radiation (DSR) with sky-clearness index and relative sunshine period as inputs for the humid subtropical climate of India. Three categories of ML models were defined, each having six models. The solar radiation data was split into two parts, the "Training dataset" used to develop the models and the "Validation dataset" used to test the models. Model accuracy was investigated as a function of various commonly used statistical pointers. A comparison was made between the ML models and wellknown empirical models from prior research. Global performance indicator was used to rank ML models within each category. The projected values from the ML models and solar radiation data were in reasonable agreement. Thus, DSR can be accurately predicted using ML models in the area under consideration.
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