A comparison study between Doane’s and Freedman-Diaconis’ binning rule in characterizing potential water resources availability

Abstract

One of the primary constraints for development and management of water resources is the spatial and temporal uncertainty of rainfall. This is due to the stability and reliability of water supply is dynamically associated with the spatial and temporal uncertainty of rainfall. However, this spatial and temporal uncertainty can be assessed using the intensity entropy (IE) and apportionment entropy (AE). The main objective of this study is to investigate the implications of the use of Doane’s and Freedman-Diaconis’ binning rule in characterizing potential water resource availability (PWRA), which the PWRA is assessed via the standardized intensity entropy (IE’) against the standardized apportionment entropy (AE’) scatter diagram. To pursue the objective of this study, the daily rainfall data recorded ranging from January 2008 to December 2016 at four rainfall monitoring stations located Coastal region of Kuantan District Pahang are analyzed. The analysis results illustrated that the use of Doane’s binning rule is more appropriate than Freedman-Diaconis’ binning rule. This is due to the resulted PWRA characteristics using Doane’s binning rule is relatively consistent with practical climate such that the study region is experiencing poor-in-water zone with less amount and high uncertainty of rainfall during the Southwest Monsoon, while abundant and perennial rainfall during the Northeast Monsoon. Furthermore, the use of Doane’s binning rule is more advantages compared to the Freedman-Diaconis’ binning rule with the abstraction of computational cost and time.