# A Distributed Incremental Update Scheme for Probability Distribution of Wind Power Forecast Error

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed incremental learning scheme for updating the probability distribution of wind power forecast errors in distributed wind generation, enabling stakeholders to improve trading decisions without sharing sensitive data.

## Contribution

It proposes a novel distributed incremental Gaussian mixture model algorithm for updating wind power forecast error distributions using only local data and neighborhood communication.

## Key findings

- The scheme accurately models the correlation among DWGs.
- It effectively updates the distribution with new data in a distributed manner.
- The approach reduces data sharing and computational burden.

## Abstract

Due to the uncertainty of distributed wind generations (DWGs), a better understanding of the probability distributions (PD) of their wind power forecast errors (WPFEs) can help market participants (MPs) who own DWGs perform better during trading. Under the premise of an accurate PD model, considering the correlation among DWGs and absorbing the new information carried by the latest data are two ways to maintain an accurate PD. These two ways both require the historical and latest wind power and forecast data of all DWGs. Each MP, however, only has access to the data of its own DWGs and may refuse to share these data with MPs belonging to other stakeholders. Besides, because of the endless generation of new data, the PD updating burden increases sharply. Therefore, we use the distributed strategy to deal with the data collection problem. In addition, we further apply the incremental learning strategy to reduce the updating burden. Finally, we propose a distributed incremental update scheme to make each MP continually acquire the latest conditional PD of its DWGs' WPFE. Specifically, we first use the Gaussian-mixture-model-based (GMM-based) joint PD to characterize the correlation among DWGs. Then, we propose a distributed modified incremental GMM algorithm to enable MPs to update the parameters of the joint PD in a distributed and incremental manner. After that, we further propose a distributed derivation algorithm to make MPs derive their conditional PD of WPFE from the joint one in a distributed way. Combining the two original algorithms, we finally achieve the complete distributed incremental update scheme, by which each MP can continually obtain its latest conditional PD of its DWGs' WPFE via neighborhood communication and local calculation with its own data. The effectiveness, correctness, and efficiency of the proposed scheme are verified using the dataset from the NREL.