Hybrid Techniques to Predict Solar Radiation Using Support Vector Machine and Search Optimization Algorithms: A Review

The use of intelligent algorithms for global solar prediction is an ideal tool for research focused on the use of solar energy. Forecasting solar radiation supports different applications focused on the generation and transport of energy in places where there are no meteorological stations. Different solar radiation prediction techniques have been applied in different time horizons, such as neural networks (ANN) or machine learning (ML), with the latter being the most important. The support vector machine (SVM) is a classification method of the ML that is used to predict solar radiation. To obtain a better accuracy of prediction data, search optimization algorithms (SOA) such as genetic algorithms (GA) and the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) were used to optimize the prediction accuracy by searching the model parameters. This article presents a review of different hybrid SVM models with SOA applied to obtain the best parameters to reduce the prediction error of solar radiation using meteorological variables. Research articles from the last 5 years on solar radiation prediction using SVM models and hybrid SMV optimized models with SOA were studied. The results show that SVM with GA presents a better performance than the classical SVM models using the Radial basis kernel function for prediction parameters.