Accurately detecting Parkinson’s disease (PD) at an early stage is certainly indispensable for slowing down its progress and providing patients the possibility of accessing to disease-modifying therapy. Towards this end, the premotor stage in PD should be carefully monitored. An innovative deep-learning technique is introduced to early uncover whether an individual is affected with PD or not based on premotor features. Specifically, to uncover PD at an early stage, several indicators have been considered in this study, including Rapid Eye Movement and olfactory loss, Cerebrospinal fluid data, and dopaminergic imaging markers. A comparison between the proposed deep learning model and twelve machine learning and ensemble learning methods based on relatively small data including 183 healthy individuals and 401 early PD patients shows the superior detection performance of the designed model, which achieves the highest accuracy, 96.45% on average. Besides detecting the PD, we also provide the feature importance on the PD detection process based on the Boosting method.

Wind power represents a promising source of renewable energies. Precise forecasting of wind power generation is crucial to mitigate the challenges of balancing supply and demand in the smart grid. Nevertheless, the major difficulty in wind power is its high fluctuation and intermittent nature, making it challenging to forecast. This study aims to develop efficient data-driven models to accurately forecast wind power generation. Crucially, the main contributions of this work are listed in the following major elements. Firstly, we investigate the performance of enhanced machine learning models to forecast univariate wind power time-series data. Specifically, we employed Bayesian optimization (BO) to optimally tune hyperparameters of the Gaussian process regression (GPR), Support Vector Regression (SVR) with different kernels, and ensemble learning (ES) models (i.e., Boosted trees and Bagged trees) and investigated their forecasting performance. Secondly, dynamic information has been incorporated in their construction to further enhance the forecasting performance of the investigated models. Specifically, we introduce lagged measurements to enable capturing time evolution into the design of the considered models. Furthermore, more input variables (e.g., wind speed and wind direction) are used to further improve wind prediction performance. Actual measurements from three wind turbines in France, Turkey, and Kaggle are used to verify the efficiency of the considered models. The results reveal the benefit of considering lagged data and input variables to better forecast wind power. The results also showed that the optimized GPR and ensemble models outperformed the other machine learning models.

The accurate modeling and forecasting of the power output of photovoltaic (PV) systems are critical to efficiently managing their integration in smart grids, delivery, and storage. This paper intends to provide efficient short-term forecasting of solar power production using Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) model. Adopting the VAE-driven deep learning model is expected to improve forecasting accuracy because of its suitable performance in time-series modeling and flexible nonlinear approximation. Both single- and multi-step-ahead forecasts are investigated in this work. Data from two grid-connected plants (a 243 kW parking lot canopy array in the US and a 9 MW PV system in Algeria) are employed to show the investigated deep learning models’ performance. Specifically, the forecasting outputs of the proposed VAE-based forecasting method have been compared with seven deep learning methods, namely recurrent neural network, Long short-term memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM, Convolutional LSTM network, Gated recurrent units, stacked autoencoder, and restricted Boltzmann machine, and two commonly used machine learning methods, namely logistic regression and support vector regression. The results of this investigation demonstrate the satisfying performance of deep learning techniques to forecast solar power and point out that the VAE consistently performed better than the other methods. Also, results confirmed the superior performance of deep learning models compared to the two considered baseline machine learning models.

This paper presents a model-based anomaly detection method for supervising the direct current (dc) side of photovotaic (PV) systems. Toward this end, a framework combining the benefits of $k$ -nearest neighbors ( $k$ NN) with univariate monitoring approaches has been proposed. Specifically, $k$ NN-based Shewhart and exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) schemes with parametric and nonparametric thresholds have been introduced to suitably detect faults in PV systems. The choice of $k$ NN method to separate normal and abnormal features is motivated by its capacity to handle nonlinear features and do not make assumptions on the underlying data distribution. In addition, because the EWMA approach is sensitive in detecting small changes. First, a simulation model for the inspected PV array is constructed. Then, residuals generated from this model are employed as the input for $k$ NN-based schemes for anomaly detection. Parametric and nonparametric thresholds using kernel density estimation have been used to detect faults. The effectiveness of the $k$ NN-based procedures is verified using actual measurements from a 9.54-kWp grid-connected system in Algeria. Results proclaim the efficiency of the proposed strategy to supervise the dc side of PV systems.