STL-FFT-STFT-TCN-LSTM: An Effective Wave Height High Accuracy Prediction Model Fusing Time-Frequency Domain Features

Abstract

As the consumption of traditional energy sources intensifies and their adverse environmental impacts become more pronounced, wave energy stands out as a highly promising member of the renewable energy family due to its high energy density, stability, widespread distribution, and environmental friendliness. The key to its development lies in the precise prediction of Significant Wave Height (WVHT). However, wave energy signals exhibit strong nonlinearity, abrupt changes, multi-scale periodicity, data sparsity, and high-frequency noise interference; additionally, physical models for wave energy prediction incur extremely high computational costs. To address these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid model combining STL-FFT-STFT-TCN-LSTM. This model exploits the Seasonal-Trend Decomposition Procedure based on Loess (STL), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT), Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) technologies. The model aims to optimize multi-scale feature fusion, capture extreme wave heights, and address issues related to high-frequency noise and periodic signals, thereby achieving efficient and accurate prediction of significant wave height. Experiments were conducted using hourly data from NOAA Station 41008 and 41047 spanning 2019 to 2022. The results showed that compared with other single models and hybrid models, the STL-FFT-STFT-TCN-LSTM model achieved significantly higher prediction accuracy in capturing extreme wave heights and suppressing high-frequency noise, with MAE reduced by 15.8\%-40.5\%, SMAPE reduced by 8.3\%-20.3\%, and R increased by 1.31\%-2.9\%; in ablation experiments, the model also demonstrated the indispensability of each component step, validating its superiority in multi-scale feature fusion.