W-HiTS-Attention: A Unified Wavelet-Hierarchical Residual-Attention Framework for Accurate and Efficient Short-Term Wind Power Forecasting

Abstract

Short-term wind power forecasting is considered a critical challenge in smart grid management due to the nonlinear, unstable, and multi-scale noise characteristics of wind signals. Although recent advances in hybrid deep learning have improved the accuracy of short-term wind power forecasting, many state-of-the-art models usually consider signal denoising, residual decomposition, and attention mechanisms as independent modules without providing a unified solution. This paper proposes an end-to-end solution, W-HiTS-Attention (Wavelet Transform, N-stacked Hierarchical Interpolation for Time Series, Attention), which coherently integrates wavelet denoising, hierarchical residual learning from N-HiTS (Neural Hierarchical Interpolation), and an in-block self-attention mechanism. The proposed solution outperforms 21 benchmarks in accuracy, including state-of-the-art baselines such as N-BEATS, N-HiTS, TCN, Informer, Autoformer, LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU, and Prophet, achieving an RMSE of 55.56 W and an R2 of 0.9918. Furthermore, the results show that the proposed solution is efficient in terms of parameter count (0.033M), latency (0.0036 ms/sample), and training time, making it promising for low-latency inference in resource-constrained environments. The results show that the coherent integration of frequency preprocessing, hierarchical residual forecasting, and attention-based temporal refinement provides a robust, explainable, and deployable solution for short-term wind power forecasting.