Forecasting of Rainfall in Central Java using Hybrid GSTAR-NN-PSO Model

Abstract

Forecasting of rainfall trends is essential for several fields, such as airline and ship management, flood control and agriculture. The rainfall data were recorded several time simultaneously at a number of locations and called the space-time data. Generalized Space Time Autoregressive (GSTAR) model is one of space-time models used to modeling and forecasting the rainfall. The aim of this research is to propose the nonlinear space-time model based on hybrid of GSTAR, Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and it called GSTAR-NN-PSO. In this model, input variable of the FFNN was obtained from the GSTAR model. Then use PSO to initialize the weight parameter in the FFNN model. This model is applied for forecasting monthly rainfall data in Jepara, Kudus, Pati and Grobogan, Central Java, Indonesia. The results show that the proposed model gives more accurate forecast than the linear space-time model, i.e. GSTAR and GSTAR-PSO. Moreover, further research about space-time models based on GSTAR and Neural Network is needed to improving the forecast accuracy especially the weight matrix in the GSTAR model.