Title: Rainfall forecasting by relevant attributes using artificial neural networks - a comparative study

Authors: Saroj Kr. Biswas; Leniency Marbaniang; Biswajit Purkayastha; Manomita Chakraborty; Heisnam Rohen Singh; Monali Bordoloi

Addresses: National Institute of Technology, Silchar-788010, Assam, India ' National Institute of Technology, Silchar-788010, Assam, India ' National Institute of Technology, Silchar-788010, Assam, India ' National Institute of Technology, Silchar-788010, Assam, India ' National Institute of Technology, Silchar-788010, Assam, India ' National Institute of Technology, Silchar-788010, Assam, India

Abstract: Many models have been developed for rainfall forecasting from time to time. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) using back propagation algorithm, are the most popular and widely used forecasting models in the present decade. Rainfall depends on many weather parameters (attributes) including pressure, temperature, wind speed, and so on. A set of attributes is habitually used for rainfall prediction, which consists of relevant and irrelevant attributes and from the viewpoint of managing a dataset which can be enormous. Hence, reducing the number of attributes by selecting only the relevant ones is desirable. Doing so, higher performance with lower computational effort is expected. Therefore, feature selection needs to be done to identify the effective parameters to improve the forecasting ability of a model. Consequently, this paper proposes a feature selection algorithm for rainfall forecasting using neural network and investigates the performance of different ANN methods such as multi-layer feed forward neural network (MLFNN), radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), focused time delay neural network (FTDNN) and nonlinear autoregressive exogenous input neural network (NARXNN). From the empirical results, it is observed that NARXNN produces better predicted accuracy than others. It is also observed that the proposed model outperforms one earlier forecasting model.

Keywords: rainfall prediction; artificial neural networks; ANNs; feature selection; sensitivity analysis; rainfall forecasting; precipitation prediction; weather forecasting.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBDI.2016.077362

International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, 2016 Vol.3 No.2, pp.111 - 121

Received: 25 Aug 2014
Accepted: 18 Mar 2015
Published online: 29 Jun 2016 *

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