To improve the monitoring of the electrical power grid, it is necessary to evaluate the influence of contamination in relation to leakage current and its progression to a disruptive discharge. In this paper, insulators were tested in a saline chamber to simulate the increase of salt contamination on their surface. From the time series forecasting of the leakage current, it is possible to evaluate the development of the fault before a flashover occurs. In this paper, for a complete evaluation, the long short-term memory (LSTM), group method of data handling (GMDH), adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), bootstrap aggregation (bagging), sequential learning (boosting), random subspace, and stacked generalization (stacking) ensemble learning models are analyzed. From the results of the best structure of the models, the hyperparameters are evaluated and the wavelet transform is used to obtain an enhanced model. The contribution of this paper is related to the improvement of well-established models using the wavelet transform, thus obtaining hybrid models that can be used for several applications. The results showed that using the wavelet transform leads to an improvement in all the used models, especially the wavelet ANFIS model, which had a mean RMSE of 1.58E-3, being the model that had the best result. Furthermore, the results for the standard deviation were 2.18E-19, showing that the model is stable and robust for the application under study. Future work can be done using other components of the distribution power grid susceptible to contamination because they are installed outdoors.
