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Paper details
Number 4 - December 2012
Volume 22 - 2012
A rainfall forecasting method using machine learning models and its application to the Fukuoka city case
S. Monira Sumi, M. Faisal Zaman, Hideo Hirose
Abstract
In the present article, an attempt is made to derive optimal data-driven machine learning methods for forecasting an average daily and monthly rainfall of the Fukuoka city in Japan. This comparative study is conducted concentrating on three aspects: modelling inputs, modelling methods and pre-processing techniques. A comparison between linear correlation analysis and average mutual information is made to find an optimal input technique. For the modelling of the rainfall, a novel hybrid multi-model method is proposed and compared with its constituent models. The models include the artificial neural network, multivariate adaptive regression splines, the k-nearest neighbour, and radial basis support vector regression. Each of these methods is applied to model the daily and monthly rainfall, coupled with a pre-processing technique including moving average and principal component analysis. In the first stage of the hybrid method, sub-models from each of the above methods are constructed with different parameter settings. In the second stage, the sub-models are ranked with a variable selection technique and the higher ranked models are selected based on the leave-one-out cross-validation error. The forecasting of the hybrid model is performed by the weighted combination of the finally selected models.
Keywords
rainfall forecasting, machine learning, multi-model method, pre-processing, model ranking