Particle swarm optimization-based support vector machine for forecasting dissolved gases content in power transformer oil

Forecasting of dissolved gases content in power transformer oil is a complicated problem due to its nonlinearity and the small quantity of training data. Support vector machine (SVM) has been successfully employed to solve regression problem of nonlinearity and small sample. However, the practicability of SVM is effected due to the difficulty of selecting appropriate SVM parameters. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a new optimization method, which is motivated by social behaviour of organisms such as bird flocking and fish schooling. The method not only has strong global search capability, but also is very easy to implement. Thus, the proposed PSO–SVM model is applied to forecast dissolved gases content in power transformer oil in this paper, among which PSO is used to determine free parameters of support vector machine. The experimental data from several electric power companies in China is used to illustrate the performance of proposed PSO–SVM model. The experimental results indicate that the PSO–SVM method can achieve greater forecasting accuracy than grey model, artificial neural network under the circumstances of small sample.