Adaptive Salp Swarm Algorithm as Optimal Feature Selection for Power Quality Disturbance Classification

Power quality disturbance (PQD) is an influential situation that significantly declines the reliability of electrical distribution systems. Therefore, PQD classification is an important process for preventing system reliability degradation. This paper introduces a novel algorithm called “adaptive salp swarm algorithm (SSA)” as an optimal feature selection algorithm for PQD classification. Feature extraction and classifier of the proposed classification system were based on the discrete wavelet and the probabilistic neural network, respectively. The classification was focused on the 13 types of power quality signals. The optimal number of selected features for the proposed classification system was firstly determined. Then, it demonstrated that the optimally selected features resulted in the highest classification accuracy of 98.77%. High performance of the proposed classification system in the noisy environment, as well as based on the real dataset was also verified. Furthermore, the proposed SSA indicates a very high convergence rate compared to other well-known algorithms. A comparison of the proposed classification system’s performance to existing works was also carried out, revealing that the proposed system’s accuracy is on a high-range scale. Hence, the adaptive SSA becomes another efficient optimal feature selection algorithm for PQD classification.