A weighted random forest approach to improve predictive performance for power system transient stability assessment

Transient stability assessment (TSA) based on machine learning techniques is a classical problem of classification. In this paper, a new transient stability assessment model using the weighted random forest (WRF) is proposed. Random forest, which runs fast and can scale to very high dimensional datasets, is one of the most popular methods applied to TSA after faults occurred. However, in the actual operation of modern power system, unstable samples constitute only a very small minority of the cases. Besides, the traditional random forest algorithm does not work very well on imbalanced data. To tackle the problem, weighted random forest is adopted to lean the interest towards to the correct classification of rare class, and improve the prediction performance. Case study on the New England 39-bus test power system exhibits that WRF has better performance than the original random forest.