Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395

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Energy Conversion and Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enconman

Empirical investigation on modeling solar radiation series

with ARMAGARCH models
Huaiwei Sun a,b,, Dong Yan a, Na Zhao a, Jianzhong Zhou a
a
School of Hydropower and Information Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430072, China
b
State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Simulation of radiation is one of the most important issues in solar utilization. Time series models are
Received 25 August 2014 useful tools in the estimation and forecasting of solar radiation series and their changes. In this paper,
Accepted 24 December 2014 the effectiveness of autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models with various generalized autoregres-
Available online 13 January 2015
sive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) processes, namely ARMAGARCH models are evaluated for
their effectiveness in radiation series. Six different GARCH approaches, which contain three different
Keywords: ARMAGARCH models and corresponded GARCH in mean (ARMAGARCH-M) models, are applied in
Models
radiation data sets from two representative climate stations in China. Multiple evaluation metrics of
Solar radiation
ARIMA
modeling sufciency are used for evaluating the performances of models. The results show that the
Generalized Autoregressive Conditional ARMAGARCH(-M) models are effective in radiation series estimation. Both in tting and prediction of
Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) radiation series, the ARMAGARCH(-M) models show better modeling sufciency than traditional mod-
Prediction els, while ARMAEGARCH-M models are robustness in two sites and the ARMAsGARCH-M models
appear very competitive. Comparisons of statistical diagnostics and model performance clearly show that
the ARMAGARCH-M models make the mean radiation equations become more sufcient. It is recom-
mended the ARMAGARCH(-M) models to be the preferred method to use in the modeling of solar radi-
ation series.
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Solar energy is a part of the suns energy that falls at the earths
surface for a wide range of applications in engineering, meteorol-
ogy, agricultural sciences, as well as in many elds of the natural
sciences [1]. Solar energy is secure, clean, and available on the
earth through the year and is considered to be very important to
the world to solve the high fuel costs and the critical situation of
the atmosphere resulting from fossil fuel applications [2]. It is
increasing to make better use of the solar energy in China to meet
the requirement of a growing industry. However, in the utilization
of solar radiation, one critical difculty is modeling solar radiation
[3]. For example, the electricity generated by solar power systems
is not as stable as those generated by other sources, which means
that it is challenging to integrate solar energy into traditional elec-
tricity systems [4]. Therefore, gathering accurate information of
solar radiation and its volatility has been a crucial issue [5,6].
Corresponding author at: School of Hydropower and Information Engineering,
Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430072, China. Tel.: +86 27
87543992 (O), +86 34 1960 0578 (cell).
E-mail address: huaiweisun@whu.edu.cn (H. Sun).
There are a number of solar energy models presented in the lit-
erature, which include mathematical linear [2,79], nonlinear
functions [1012], Support Vector Machines (SVM) [13], articial
neural network [1418], fuzzy logic [19,20], and some hybrid
approaches [2125]. The most popular model was the linear model
by Angstrom-Prescott [7,17] and its adjusted approaches [26,27],
which establishes a linear relationship between global radiation
and sunshine duration besides the knowledge of extraterrestrial
solar radiation and the theoretical maximum daily solar hours.
However, the maximum difculty to obtain an accurate solar
energy prediction model is the availability of a long term weather
data [28]. Time-series regression models were employed by
another group of investigators [6,29], e.g. Zaharim et al. [30] use
the ARMA BoxJenkins method to model global solar radiation data
in Malaysia. Although accurate prediction of the mean solar radia-
tion can be provided by these methods, the turbulence (volatility
or heteroscedasticity) of solar radiation is often lost. In other
words, although the linearity in the mean or the rst moment of
solar radiation can be captured by linear time series models, the
variance that may be responsible for nonlinearity is rarely consid-
ered in solar radiation modeling. Autoregressive integrated moving
average (ARIMA) models with generalized autoregressive

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2014.12.072
0196-8904/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
386 H. Sun et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395

conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) [31,32] processes are the
widely used approaches to modeling the mean and volatility of
time series. GARCH models have been applied widely to a range
of time series, especially in nance and nancial decisions [33],
however, these models have not yet received much attention from
the energy community except for wind speed forecasting [3436].
As such, it is necessary to have an attempt to apply these models in
radiation modeling and give a comprehensively evaluation to
them. This paper is written to show our effect in this aspect and
concerns the development of GARCH models in radiation model-
ing. Specically, six different ARMAGARCH(-M) models are used
in this study to investigate their performances as applied to two
representative data sets collected from China.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews
are both equal to 1, the GARCH model is also called the standard
GARCH model, denoted as SGARCH in this paper.
2.2. Typical variants of GARCH models
There are some typical variants of the GARCH family of models,
which are established in an attempt to account for nonlinear
effects [36]. A brief introduction to these GARCH models used in
this study is provided below.
The gjrGARCH model, which was developed by Glosten et al.
[37], is used to model the asymmetry in the GARCH process. The
mathematical form of gjrGARCH model with autoregressive terms
and moving averaging terms is dened as follows,
X
p X
q

the general GARCH methodology and their typical variants and yt l /i yti hj etj et
presents different metrics related to model performances. Section i1 j1

3 describes the data source for this empirical study. Section 4 X

h X
l X
l 3
applies different ARMAGARCH(-M) approaches to model the v t 10 1i v ti gi e2ti ce2ti Iti
i1 i1 i1
mean and volatility of monthly time series. Also, the prediction p
accuracy of different models is compared in this section. Finally,
et v t et
Section 5 summarizes the results of the empirical investigation where I 
ti 0 if eti P 0, and I ti 1 if eti < 0.
and gives brief remarks to conclude this paper. EGARCH model developed by Nelson [38] is another common
form of GARCH model. Formally, an EGARCH(k, l) with autoregres-
sive terms and moving averaging terms is dened as follows,
2. Methods
X
p X
q

2.1. Foundation of GARCH models yt l /i yti hj etj et

i1 j1

A common nding in time series modeling is that the residuals X

h X
l
logv t 10 1i logv ti gi gzti 4
are correlated with their own lagged values. Autoregressive mov- i1 i1
ing average (ARMA) models are widely used to predict the solar h   i
 t  pe
t 
radiation time series, and properties of these models are well gzti hzt c pe
vt   E  vt 
p
understood. An ARMA model uses an AR term and a moving aver- et v t et
age (MA) term. The ARMA specications can be combined to form
an ARMA (p, q) specication where c is usually set to 1. The GARCH model in Eq. (2) imposes the
nonnegative constraints on the parameters 1i and gi, however, in
X
p X
q the EGARCH model, restrictions on these parameters are removed
yt l /i yti hj etj et 1 as Nelson and Cao [39] argued that the non-negativity constraints
i1 j1
in the linear GARCH model are too restrictive.
In this paper, an ARMAGARCH-in-mean (ARMAGARCH-M)
where yt is the monthly mean total daily solar radiation, l is a
model which adds a heteroskedasticity term into the mean equa-
constant term, /i the ith autoregressive coefcient, hj the jth mov-
tion to show the impact of volatility on mean prediction is also
ing average coefcient, and et the error term at time t. p and q are
used to simultaneously model and predict the mean and volatility
the orders of autoregressive and moving average terms,
of radiation series. Here the GARCH model could be in any forms
respectively.
such as gjrGARCH and EGARCH. For instance, for an ARMA
Engle [31] and Bollerslev [32] were the rst to describe and use
GARCH-M model with ARMA (p, q) and sGARCH, the specied
ARCH and GARCH models, which have been used extensively in
mathematical form is,
time series that display time-varying volatility. During the study,
X
p X
q
p
Engle found that large or small residuals often appear in clusters, yt l /i yti hj etj k0 v t et
which was called conditional heteroscedasticity or the ARCH effect i1 j1 5
[31]. The ARCH effect explains the variation of the residual is not a
v t 10 11 v t1 g e 2
1 t1
constant but depends on the value of the previous volatility term.
Assume that the error term et is said to follow a GARCH process, the where k0 are constant coefcients.
simplest specication of ARMAGARCH model used here also
includes autoregressive terms and moving averaging terms as 2.3. Performance evaluation of GARCH models
follows:
The following metrics were used in this study to evaluate the
X
p X
q
time series models. The denitions of criteria are shown as follows:
yt l /i yti hj etj et
i1 j1
1X N
X
h X
l 2 MAE jSi  Oi j 6
v t 10 1i v ti gi e2ti N i1
i1 i1
p v
et v t et u N
u1 X
RMSE t Si  Oi 2 7
where 1i and gi are constant coefcients, k and l are orders, et is a N i1
white noise sequence with mean 0 and variance 1. When k and l
 H. Sun et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395
X
N series, the rst 240 monthly mean total daily solar radiation values
Si  Oi 2
i1
NSE 1 
X
N
2
Oi  O
i1
0 12
X N
B Oi  OSi  S C
B C
B C
R B
2
Bv vC
i1
C 9
Bu X
u N
uX C mean values of two solar radiation series are 1.381 MJ/m2 and
@u
N
t O  O2 t S  S2 A
i i
i1 i1
The commonly used criteria of mean absolute error (MAE),
which records in real units the level of overall agreement between
the observed and modeled datasets, is calculated by using Eq. (6).
In Eq. (8), the NashSutcliffe efciency (NSE), which determines
the relative magnitude of the residual variance (noise) compared
to the measured data variance (information), is dened [40]. NSE
indicates how well the plot of observed versus simulated data ts
the 1:1 line, as a value of 1 corresponds to a perfect match of mod-
eled to the observed data and the model is more accurate while the
value closer to 1. The commonly used criteria of RMSE and R2 were
calculated by Eqs. (7) and (9), respectively. Also, a criteria namely
bR2, which is obtained as R2 multiplied by the slope of the regres-
sion line between simulated and observed values, was used in this
study as accounting for the discrepancy in the magnitude of two
signals. By using these criteria, we illustrate the application of
the above methods for two monthly mean total daily solar radia-
tion series from two different climate areas. These two radiation
data sets are selected to investigate and compare the GARCH
model efciency and advantage for modeling the radiation series.
3. Radiation data from two study sites
The daily record of solar radiation series data at two represen-
tative climate stations were selected in this study to evaluate the
approaches. These included Beijing (39.8N, 116.5E) in the North
China Plain with a temperate monsoon climate, and Urumqi
(43.5N, 87.4E) in the Northwest with an arid climate in the center
of the Eurasian continent.
The measured period was from January 1, 1983 to December 31,
2012, with measurements of total daily solar radiation, daily extra-
terrestrial solar radiation, and sunshine duration records included
in the dataset. The data were obtained from the National Meteoro-
logical Information Center and the China Meteorological Adminis-
tration. Preliminary quality control tests were conducted by the
suppliers. For these station, all the instruments utilized in this
study were calibrated periodically and were made following the
World Meteorological Organization guidelines. Specially, the mea-
sure of solar radiation is taken by pyranometer. The researchers
further checked the data and the basic statistics of the radiation
series data are summarized in Table 1. In total, there are 10958
observation daily records for solar radiation. It is carried out a fre-
quency conversion from the daily data into the monthly average
values, and 360 values obtained for each site. In the radiation
Table 1
Geographical coordinates and general statistics of radiation data sets in two sites.
Sites Geographical coordinates
Latitude Longitude Altitude (m)
Urumqi 43470 N 87390 E 935.0
Beijing 39480 N 116280 E 31.3
387
are used to develop models, and then the rest of data set (120 val-
8 ues) in each site is used to test the models performance. During
the study, modeling and programming are written in R code and
four packages namely forecast [41], rugarch [42], fBasics [43], and
hydroGOF [44] are used.
Also, Fig. 1 is drawn to further illustrate the variation features of
solar radiation over time. According to Table 1 and Fig. 1, it can be
seen that the solar radiation changes in the range of 3.139
25.581 MJ/m2 in Urumqi and 4.89222.481 MJ/m2 in Beijing. The
1.352 MJ/m2, with standard deviations being 6.871 MJ/m2 and
4.514 MJ/m2, respectively. Radiation data in two stations are nega-
tively skewed and leptokurtic. In addition, the gures show that
solar radiation series exhibit high volatility over time.
4. Result and discussion
4.1. Estimation of GARCH models
Before building ARMAGARCH(-M) models for the rst 20 years
(240 values) of radiation data sets obtained from Urumqi and Bei-
jing Stations, time-series ARMA models were developed as the rst
stage to identify the underlying model structures governing the
mean solar radiation. Firstly, the time series were checked for sta-
tionary to verify the identication of an appropriate BoxJenkins
models [45]. The free library package forecast [41] was used in this
step, the results indicated that no differences were required for sta-
tionary series in two sites. Secondly, the plots of the Auto-Correla-
tion Function (ACF) and Partial Auto-Correlation Function (PACF)
were drawn to give help in identifying the ARMA model that best
describes the resulting stationary time-series. As shown in Fig. 2,
the ACFs of the series appear to have a seasonal pattern and the
values trend to 0 in 3 lags in Urumqi and Beijing, respectively. In
order to simply the t process of the best ARIMA model to radia-
tion time series, the stepwise algorithm outlined in [41] was used
in this study. The orders of the autoregressive and moving average
terms are determined according to the minimum Akaike Informa-
tion Criterion (AIC). As the results also indicate no seasonal or dif-
ference terms needed in the model structures, the constructed
ARMA model in Urumqi has the autoregressive order of 3 and
the moving average order of 3, thereby expressed as ARMA (3, 3)
while an ARMA (2, 3) was used in Beijing.
Due to its simplicity and robustness, the GARCH (1, 1) structure
is adopted for the GARCH component. After the model structure is
determined, the parameter values in different GARCH models of
Urumqi and Beijing are reported in Tables 2 and 3, respectively.
There are both the estimated parameter values and the evaluation
statistics of model sufciency. For estimated parameter values,
there are two parts of the results, the values of the model param-
eters and standard errors which are in parenthesis are provided. It
is clearly shown in Tables that the parameters are signicant and
the models are valid. Apart from the statistical signicance of the
parameters, an important test is that the residuals of the estimated
model are white noise. Ljung-Box (1978), also called Q-test, was
used as a convenient test for white noise. In Tables 2 and 3, the
Statistics
Min. (MJ/m2) Max. (MJ/m2) Mean (MJ/m2) Sd. Kurtosis Skewness
3.139 25.581 1.381 6.871 1.512 0.039
4.892 22.481 1.352 4.514 1.201 0.066
388 H. Sun et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395

Fig. 1. Monthly solar radiation series in 19832012 at two sites (a, Urumqi; b, Beijing).

Fig. 2. Plots of ACF and PACF of radiation series in two sites (a, ACF in Urumqi; b, PACF in Urumqi; c, ACF in Beijing; d, PACF in Beijing).

results from the Q-tests indicate that the models built for Urumqi
and Beijing become signicant. In the bottom of the table, the
results of Log-likelihood, AIC, and BIC are also provided. In the sta-
tistical signicance testing, the signicance levels normally used
are 1%, 5%, and 10%. By examining the tables, it can be seen that
the parameters in equations are nearly all less than 0.01 which
point out that the tted models are highly signicant and the mod-
els are appropriate.
The comparisons of observed and estimated radiation values in
different models are shown in Figs. 3 and 4. In Urumqi, the R2 val-
ues between observed and estimated values vary within a narrow
band of 0.9494 and 0.9611 depending on models. The tted R2 val-
ues are higher in the ARMAGARCH-M model than other models.
For the other site, namely Beijing station, the R2 values are between
0.8589 and 0.8759 in Beijing and the ARMAGARCH-M models
have better performance than other models expect for ARMAgjr-
GARCH-M model though the difference is small. Expert for the
ARMAgjrGARCH-M model in Beijing, the p-values of parameter
k0 in the ARMAGARCH-M models are all less than 0.01 which
indicates the strengthened explanatory power of mean models is
necessary. All these results of signicance testing basically state
that the ARMAGARCH-M models make the mean radiation equa-
tions become more sufcient.
4.2. Total radiation prediction
The rest of radiation data (120 values) are used to test the pre-
diction accuracy of the tted models based on the initial 240 val-
ues. The metrics of MAE, RMSE, NSE, R2, and bR2 are used to
evaluate the prediction accuracy. The hydroGOF package [44] was
used to calculate these metrics. By using the ARMA model for the
testing dataset in Urumqi, the values of MAE, RMSE, NSE, R2, and
bR2 are obtained to be 3.321, 3.680, 0.710, 0.892, and 0.794, respec-
tively. As shown in Table 5, these values are 1.785, 2.190, 0.758,
0.787, and 0.766 in Beijing and also suggesting that the tted
ARMA models have the capability of accurate prediction. Then,
we compared the obtain ARMAGARCH(-M) models with the
ARMA model, as well as ANN and AR-ANN model. The ANN and
AR-ANN model are included because they are usually useful in
short-term forecasting. As a comparison, we only use feed-forward
neural networks with a single hidden layer for forecasting radia-
tion time series. It can be seen from Tables 4 and 5, it is shown that
the ARMAGARCH models have better performance than ARMA
models as the largest value of NSE equal to 0.956 obtained by
ARMAsGARCH-M model for Urumqi and 0.878 obtained by
ARMAEGARCH-M model for Beijing. Also, the ANN and AR-ANN
model have very different performances in radiation predictions.
 H. Sun et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395 389

Table 2
Parameter estimation and statistical diagnostics of different models used in Urumqi.

Parameter ARMA ARMAsGARCH ARMAgjrGARCH ARMAEGARCH ARMAsGARCH-M ARMAgjrGARCH-M ARMAEGARCH-M

Parameter estimates (robust standard error)
l 13.786***(0.102) 13.802***(0.096) 13.698***(0.006) 13.765***(0.104) 3.552***(0.037) 4.562***(0.087) 4.277***(0.577)
/1 1.002***(0.145) 1.083***(0.034) 0.777***(3.02e4) 1.038***(0.006) 2.731***(2.52e4) 0.711***(2.57e4) 1.400***(3.67e4)
/2 0.272 (0.251) 0.131**(0.059) 0.661***(2.82e4) 0.208*** (8.936e3) 2.731***(2.48e4) 0.768***(6.5e5) 0.426***(9.5e5)
/3 0.737***(0.145) 0.656***(0.035) 0.961***(2.2e5) 0.701***(6.607e3) 1.000***(9.4e5) 1.021***(1.52e4) 0.331***(1.05e4)
h1 0.627***(0.132) 0.718***(0.064) 0.394***(5.1e5) 0.658***(0.050) 2.713***(5.0e5) 0.688***(9.7e5) 1.425***(5.38e4)
h2 0.427*(0.174) 0.331***(0.072) 0.782***(1.2e4) 0.392***(0.046) 2.684***(9.2e5) 0.805***(1.5e5) 0.434***(3.47e4)
h3 0.554*** (0.089) 0.531***(0.047) 0.760***(1.55e4) 0.552***(0.033) 0.973***(5e6) 1.000***(1.61e4) 0.319***(3.15e4)
k0 / / / / 3.242***(0.008) 5.675***(0.007) 8.351***(0.471)
10 / 21.596***(2.850) 3.108*** (0.946) 1.089 (1.380) 15.105***(0.0945) 2.591***(0.039) 1.516***(0.165)
g1 / 0 (6.867e3) 0.092 (0.091) 0.093 (0.332) 0 (0) 0.059***(0.008) 0.053***(0.013)
11 / 3e5 (0.101) 1.89e4 (0.036) 0.102 (1.335) 0.002***(8.45e4) 0.006***(5.7e5) 0.015*(0.009)
c / / 0.183***(0.035) 0.345*(0.224) / 0.084***(0.010) 0.001 (0.014)
Diagnostics
Log- 446.480 450.095 438.310 444.643 421.511 413.411 416.907
likelihood
AIC 3.804 3.851 3.761 3.814 3.621 3.562 3.591
BIC 3.949 4.025 3.950 4.002 3.810 3.765 3.794
Q[24] 21.029*** 9.294*** 22.588*** 24.559*** 18.116* 19.480*** 10.444*

Notes:
*
Means signicant at the 10% level, two-sided test.
**
Means signicant at the 5% level, two-sided test.
***
Means signicant at the 1% level, two-sided test.

Table 3
Parameter estimation and statistical diagnostics of different models used in Beijing.

Parameter ARMA ARMAsGARCH ARMAgjrGARCH ARMAEGARCH ARMAsGARCH-M ARMAgjrGARCH-M ARMAEGARCH-M

Parameter estimates (robust standard error)
l 13.590*** (12.594) 13.483***(0.115) 13.554***(0.118) 13.571***(0.082) 9.870***(1.057) 14.616***(1.149) 9.069***(1.171)
/1 1.736***(0.005) 1.734***(0.003) 1.734***(0.003) 1.734***(0.003) 1.734*** (0.005) 1.734***(0.003) 1.731***(0.002)
/2 1.003***(0.006) 1.001***(0.003) 1.001***(0.003) 1.001***(0.003) 1.002***(0.004) 1.001***(0.003) 0.999***(0.002)
h1 1.375***(0.055) 1.398***(0.067) 1.414***(0.062) 1.399***(0.061) 1.514***(0.057) 1.355***(0.092) 1.653***(0.015)
h2 0.481***(0.088) 0.484***(0.106) 0.500***(0.097) 0.480***(0.087) 0.660***(0.090) 0.405***(0.144) 0.874***(0.017)
h3 0.192***(0.053) 0.211***(0.062) 0.200***(0.056) 0.208***(0.041) 0.117***(0.043) 0.257***(0.081) 0.003 (0.005)
k0 / / / / 2.265***(0.627) 0.640 (0.691) 2.790***(0.763)
10 / 2.240***(0.330) 2.336***(0.341) 1.006***(0.078) 0.867*(0.518) 2.342***(0.387) 0.872***(0.151)
g1 / 0.234*(0.130) 0.426***(0.213) 0.216**(0.100) 0***(0.067) 0.425*(0.263) 0.144***(0.018)
11 / 0.000***(0.005) 0.000***(0.004) 0.001 (0.085) 0.666***(0.233) 0.000 (0.014) 0.075 (0.138)
c / / 0.432***(0.212) 0.333**(0.164) / 0.429*(0.253) 0.030 (0.085)
Diagnostics
Log-likelihood 467.995 466.171 463.594 463.706 460.359 463.883 459.478
AIC 3.975 3.976 3.963 3.964 3.936 3.974 3.937
BIC 4.106 4.136 4.137 4.138 4.110 4.163 4.126
Q[24] 42.063*** 46.498*** 46.459*** 45.360*** 56.456*** 47.396*** 44.414***

Notes:
*
Means signicant at the 10% level, two-sided test.
**
Means signicant at the 5% level, two-sided test.
***
Means signicant at the 1% level, two-sided test.

In Urumqi, the AR term can improve the NSE of radiation modeling
from 0.107 to 0.799, and the values also changed from 0.164 to
0.473 in Beijing. These performances may be improved by using
coupled method or advanced algorithm. In the related literature,
Flores et al. [46] have used an evolutionary loop to improve the
performance of ANN models in different climate series and got a
better prediction than ARMA models. Also, Chattopadhyay et al.
[47] have used a coupled method of AR and ANN to get a better
result than ARMA models. Due to the scope of this study, we only
selected the ordinary methods of ANN as a comparison. As the ANN
models have poorer performance than ARMAGARCH(-M) models
and cannot offer the volatility information, these models will no
longer be consider in the remaining work for comparison purpose.
Except for two performance measures (R2 and bR2), the perfor-
mance ranking is constant among the models as shown in Tables 4
and 5, namely in the descending order of ARMAsGARCH-M,
ARMAEGARCH-M, ARMAgjrGARCH-M, ARMAsGARCH, ARMA
EGARCH, ARMAgjrGARCH, and ARMA model in Urumqi and
ARMAEGARCH-M, ARMAsGARCH-M, ARMAsGARCH, ARMA
gjrGARCH, ARMAEGARCH, ARMAgjrGARCH-M, and ARMA model
in Beijing. The maximum performance differences in mean abso-
lute error are 2.296 MJ/m2 and 0.562 MJ/m2 in Urumqi and Beijing,
respectively. Also, the ARMAGARCH-M models have the best per-
formance both in Urumqi and Beijing. The results are expected and
somewhat consistent with the ndings in literatures [33,34]. The
ARMAGARCH-M models capture both the conditional mean and
conditional heteroscedasticity, which contributes to the better per-
formance of ARMAGARCH-M models than other models.
4.3. Further discussion on predicting total radiation output
The volatility information can be captured by ARMAGARCH
models, which are different to the traditional point forecasting
models such as ARMA, neural network, SVM, and hybrid models.
390 H. Sun et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395

Fig. 3. Comparisons of observed and estimated radiation values in Urumqi (a, ARMA; b, ARMAsGARCH; c, ARMAgjrGARCH; d, ARMAEGARCH; e, ARMAsGARCH-M;
f, ARMAgjrGARCH-M; g, ARMAEGARCH-M).

Figs. 5 and 6 show the predictions which implying the trend of
actual radiation can be well captured by the predictions and the
change characteristics of radiation series. As shown in Figs. 5(a)
and 6(a), the gaps between the measured radiation points and pre-
dicted values obtained by ARMA models are larger than other
models.
The interval estimation of radiation value is conducted at 95%
condence interval. It is obvious that although the solar total radi-
ation dramatically changes over years, the estimated intervals of
ARMAGARCH(-M) models keep embracing it well. The numerical
calculation shows that there are 119 observation, namely 99.2% of
the 120 observations in the testing dataset, which are scattered in
the respective estimated intervals of ARMAsGARCH-M model in
Urumqi (Table 6). This result empirically veries that the interval
estimation of radiation is accurate and reliable. Also, the ARMA
EGARCH-M model has the best performance to give an interval
estimation of radiation simulation in Beijing. In literatures,
ARCH/GARCH models are believed to have better performances in
non-constant volatility of the time series data [48,49]. If we bal-
ance the predication accuracy and interval estimation of models,
the ARMAEGARCH-M model appears to be the one which is pre-
ferred in radiation modeling. This is because the model structure
has the advantage of robustness, and it has the best performance
in radiation modeling in Beijing and the second ranking in model-
ing radiation series in Urumqi. Also, the ARMAEGARCH-M model
has overall good interval estimation accuracy. Certainly, the
ARMAsGARCH-M model is very competitive as it produces the
lowest MAE and RMSE among this group of 6 models in modeling
 H. Sun et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395 391

Fig. 4. Comparisons of observed and estimated radiation values in Urumqi (a, ARMA; b, ARMAsGARCH; c, ARMAgjrGARCH; d, ARMAEGARCH; e, ARMAsGARCH-M;
f, ARMAgjrGARCH-M; g, ARMAEGARCH-M).

Table 4
Predicting performance of different models used in Urumqi.

Prediction performance ARMA ARMA ARMA ARMA ARMA ARMA ARMA ANN AR-
index sGARCH gjrGARCH EGARCH sGARCH-M gjrGARCH-M EGARCH-M ANN
MAE 3.321 1.829 1.977 1.904 1.025 1.305 1.167 6.380 2.656
RMSE 3.680 2.459 2.614 2.541 1.44 1.851 1.526 7.190 3.075
NSE 0.710 0.871 0.854 0.862 0.956 0.927 0.950 0.107 0.799
R2 0.892 0.907 0.890 0.904 0.956 0.928 0.954 0.004 0.908
bR2 0.794 0.900 0.887 0.898 0.953 0.905 0.923 0.003 0.814
392 H. Sun et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395

Table 5
Predicting performance of different models used in Beijing.

Prediction performance ARMA ARMA ARMA ARMA ARMA ARMA ARMA ANN AR-
index sGARCH gjrGARCH EGARCH sGARCH-M gjrGARCH-M EGARCH-M ANN
MAE 1.785 1.266 1.284 1.302 1.259 1.308 1.223 4.079 2.774
RMSE 2.190 1.665 1.690 1.715 1.646 1.723 1.556 4.801 3.250
NSE 0.758 0.860 0.856 0.852 0.863 0.850 0.878 0.164 0.473
R2 0.787 0.864 0.865 0.859 0.874 0.859 0.879 0.002 0.827
bR2 0.766 0.860 0.863 0.857 0.873 0.859 0.875 0.002 0.795

Fig. 5. Comparison of measured data and the 95% condence interval by models in Urumqi (a, ARMA; b, ARMAsGARCH; c, ARMAgjrGARCH; d, ARMAEGARCH; e, ARMA
sGARCH-M; f, ARMAgjrGARCH-M; g, ARMAEGARCH-M).
 H. Sun et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395 393

Fig. 6. Comparison of measured data and the 95% condence interval by models in Beijing (a, ARMA; b, ARMAsGARCH; c, ARMAgjrGARCH; d, ARMAEGARCH; e, ARMA
sGARCH-M; f, ARMAgjrGARCH-M; g, ARMAEGARCH-M).

Table 6
The numbers of the predicted points outside the 95% condence interval.

Sites ARMA ARMAsGARCH ARMAgjrGARCH ARMAEGARCH ARMAsGARCH-M ARMAgjrGARCH-M ARMAEGARCH-M

Urumqi 80 13 29 32 1 10 3
Beijing 24 14 13 16 15 13 10
394 H. Sun et al. / Energy Conversion and Management 92 (2015) 385395
radiation in Urumqi. The similar result is reported in literatures
[33], which due to the advantage of ARMAsGARCH-M models
simplicity and robustness. Over all, the ARMAGARCH-M models
are more effective for forecasting solar radiation mean and volatil-
ity (see Table 6).
5. Conclusions
Simulation of radiation is one of the most important issues in
solar utilization. As a result of the increasing number of solar
energy application, a large number of solar radiation computation
models ranging from very complicated computer codes to empiri-
cal relations were developed. For most practical purposes and
users, the availability of the input data and the model accuracy
are taken into account for choosing models. In this paper, The
empirical investigation based on the datasets collected from two
sites in China are taken by using time-series method with
ARMAGARCH(-M) models. The long-term measured radiation
monthly series from January 1, 1983 to December 31, 2012 were
used in this study, and the rst 20 years radiation data was used
to develop models and the rest of 10 years data was used for vali-
dation. The results show that the ARMAGARCH(-M) models are
effective
(1) Both in Urumqi and Beijing stations, the ARMAGARCH-M
model shows the best performance in tting models. Also,
the statistical diagnostics and R2 values state that the
ARMAGARCH-M models make the make the mean radia-
tion equations become more sufcient.
(2) Five metrics, namely MAE, RMSE, NSE, R2, and bR2 are used
to evaluate the model performances in radiation predication.
Although the ARMA model obtained acceptance accuracy in
prediction, however, the ARMAGARCH(-M) models are pre-
ferred by this study. The largest values of NSE were equal to
0.956 by ARMAsGARCH-M model in Urumqi and 0.878 by
ARMAEGARCH-M model in Beijing.
(3) Different from the traditional point forecasting models, the
volatility information can also be captured by ARMA
GARCH(-M) models. The interval estimation of radiation,
which is conducted at 95% condence interval, clearly
shown the accurate and reliable estimation performance
by ARMAGARCH(-M) models. ARMAEGARCH-M model
shows the advantage of robustness in radiation prediction
and ARMAsGARCH-M model appears to be competitive
among models.
It is recommended the ARMAGARCH(-M) model to be the pre-
ferred method to use in the modeling of solar radiation series. The
results of this study indicate that the application of ARMA
GARCH(-M) models would be a promising alternative over the tra-
ditional approaches in the estimation of solar radiation series.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the National Sciences Founda-
tion of China (Grants 51309106 and 51239004) and the Funda-
mental Research Funds of the Central Universities (Grant
2014QN235) for nancially supporting this work. Many thanks
go to Dr. Xiaohui Yuan and Dr. Chaoshun Li for the assistance
and comments in result analysis. Special thanks go to the National
Meteorological Information Center, China Meteorological Adminis-
tration for providing the long-term data records.
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