Neuro-fuzzy modeling and prediction of summer precipitation with application to different meteorological stations

Abstract

Research community has a growing interest in neural networks because of their practical applications in many fields for accurate modeling and prediction of the complex behavior of systems arising from engineering, economics, business, financial and metrological fields. Artificial neural networks (ANN) are very flexible function approximations tool used as universal modeling based on the separating of the past dynamics into clusters, in which we construct local models to capture the potential growth of the series depends on the previously known values. In this study, rain data of five major cities of Sindh province of Pakistan is considered, and summer rainfall of these five synoptic stations are statistically evaluated for prediction. The nonlinear autoregressive network with exogenous inputs (NARX) model for a time series is analyzed to evaluate the pattern of precipitation. We train a highly nonlinear NARX network model from randomly generated initial weights that converged to the best solution with the help of the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. A multi-step ahead NARX response time predictor is developed for rain forecasting. The performance of the NARX model is viable to capture nonlinear behavior with a high value of correlation coefficient R ranging from 0.70 to 0.99 for different synoptic stations. The results calculated using the proposed NARX neural network time series approach are accurate and reliable based on the coefficient of correlation and mean square error indices for rainfall forecasting.