Photovoltaic Generation Forecast: Model Training and Adversarial Attack Aspects

Forecasting photovoltaic (PV) power generation, as in many other time series scenarios, is a challenging task. Most current solutions for time series forecasting are grounded on Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, which usually outperform statistical-based methods. However, solutions based on ML and, more recently, Deep Learning (DL) have been found vulnerable to adversarial attacks throughout their execution. With this in mind, in this work we explore four time series analysis techniques, namely Naive, a baseline technique for time series, Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), from the statistical field, and Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) and Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), from the DL family. These techniques are used to forecast the power generation of a PV power plant 15 minutes and 24 hours ahead, having as input only power generation historical data. Two main aspects were analyzed: i) how training size influenced the performance of the forecasting models and ii) how univariate time series data could be modified by an adversarial attack to decrease models’ performance through cross-technique transferability. For i), the mentioned methods were used and evaluated with monthly updates. For ii), Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), along with a logistic regression substitute model and past data, were used to perform attacks against DL models at test time. LSTM and TCN decreased the error as the training sample size increased and outperformed Naive and ARIMA models. Adversarial samples were able to reduce the performance of LSTM and TCN, particularly for short-term forecasts.