From small farms to electricity markets the interest and importance of wind power production is continuously increasing. This interest is mainly caused by the fact that wind is a continuous resource of clean energy. To take full advantage of the potential of wind power production it is crucial to have tools that accurately forecast the expected wind speed. However, forecasting the wind speed is not a trivial task. Wind speed is characterised by a random behaviour as well as several other intermittent characteristics. This paper proposes a new approach to the task of wind speed forecasting. The main distinguishing feature of this proposal is its reliance on both temporal and spatial characteristics to produce a forecast of the future wind speed. We have experimentally tested the proposed method with historical data concerning wind speed on the eastern region of the US. Nevertheless, the methodology that is described in the paper can be seen as a general approach to spatio-temporal prediction. We have compared our proposal to other standard approaches in the task of forecasting 2 hours ahead wind speed. Our extensive experiments show that our proposal has clear advantages in most setups.
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