A prediction method of NOx in thermal power plants using GC-LSTM neural network

The emission of NOx in thermal power plants would cause serious pollution to the environment, and effective prediction of NOx has important significance. With the development of deep learning, many methods can effectively solve the prediction problem. In this paper, a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network based on the generalized correntropy (GC) loss function, which is called the GC-LSTM neural network here, is proposed to predict the NOx emission. In order to make the characteristics of high-dimensional data have the same measurement scale, normalization is used to preprocess data firstly. Then, the processed historical data is used as training data to train the GC-LSTM neural network. After that, the emission of the NOx at each time instant can be predicted according to the online measured relevant data based on the established GC-LSTM neural network. Finally, prediction results under the LSTM neural network with GC, mean square error (MSE) and the mean absolute error (MAE) loss functions are given. And according to the simulation results, it can be seen that the loss function curve of the LSTM network based on GC is more stable and has better convergence. It can be seen that the proposed GC-LSTM prediction is more accurate, by comparing the probability density function (PDF) and root mean square error (RMSE) of the error between the actual values and the prediction values.