A Shallow Recurrent Decoder for Dynamic State Estimation with a Limited Number of PMUs in Power Systems

Andrea Pomarico, Alberto Berizzi, J. Nathan Kutz

Dynamic State Estimation (DSE) will play a fundamental role in future power system operation by providing real-time estimates of the system state and enabling enhanced situational awareness. Existing DSE approaches are primarily based on Kalman filter variants or Machine Learning (ML) techniques. However, Kalman-based methods often suffer from high computational complexity, sensitivity to model inaccuracies, and performance degradation under strongly nonlinear operating conditions. Moreover, their effectiveness critically depends on the number and placement of measurements, since suboptimal PMU locations can reduce observability and even render state estimation infeasible. Machine learning approaches alleviate some of these limitations but typically require large amounts of training data and may struggle to generalize. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a SHallow REcurrent Decoder (SHRED) architecture for full-state reconstruction of power systems from sparse measurements. Unlike conventional model-based estimators, the proposed approach does not rely on an accurate physical model and is largely insensitive to PMU placement, making it particularly attractive for practical deployment in existing Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS). The method is validated on the IEEE 39-bus system under strongly nonlinear conditions, including short-circuit disturbances. The results demonstrate that SHRED can accurately reconstruct the complete system state using only a limited number of PMU measurements, consistently outperforming a state-of-the-art shallow decoder benchmark in sparse-measurement scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed framework exhibits strong robustness to measurement noise and maintains high reconstruction accuracy even under severe disturbances, highlighting its potential as a scalable and reliable alternative to conventional DSE techniques.