How Much Sunlight Will Reach the Panels?
From the time of day, temperature, pressure, humidity and wind, how much solar radiation is reaching the ground? Solar operators use the estimate to plan output and fill gaps when a sensor is down.
The table
Readings from a weather station in Hawaii, with time of day, sunrise and sunset, temperature, pressure, humidity and wind, and measured solar radiation. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Solar Radiation Prediction, 32,686 rows by 11 columns, licensed ODbL. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.82. At 32,686 rows and 10 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 8,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.
Walkthrough
Load it from the catalogue
Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.
import pandas as pd from welt import Client with Client() as client: item = client.research_datasets(q="solar radiation prediction", limit=1)["items"][0] info = client.research_dataset(item["id"]) data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"]) target = info["targets"][0] target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)Pick the rows
Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 8,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.
known = data.dropna(subset=[target]) new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1) table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(8000, random_state=7)Compare the models and predict
The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. RMSE and MAE are average errors in the target's own units, so lower is better. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.
with Client() as client: evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="regression", seed=7, models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"]) model = evaluation.fit() print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "rmse_mean", "mae_mean"]]) features = new_rows.drop(columns=target) print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features)}))
What you get
Try it
Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "solar radiation prediction", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".
Open with
- Type
- Use case
- Area
- Energy
- Question
- How Much Sunlight Will Reach the Panels?
- Model
- TabICLv2, Kumo Tabular Medium
- Data
- Solar Radiation Prediction, 32,686 rows
- For
- Solar farm operators and energy forecasters
- Licence
- ODbL