Rainfall prediction using hybrid neural network approach

A novel rainfall prediction method has been proposed. In the present work rainfall prediction in Southern part of West Bengal (India) has been conducted. A two-step method has been employed. Greedy forward selection algorithm is used to reduce the feature set and to find the most promising features for rainfall prediction. First, in the training phase the data is clustered by applying k-means algorithm, then for each cluster a separate Neural Network (NN) is trained. The proposed two step prediction model (Hybrid Neural Network or HNN) has been compared with MLP-FFN classifier in terms of several statistical performance measuring metrics. The data for experimental purpose is collected by Dumdum meteorological station (West Bengal, India) over the period from 1989 to 1995. The experimental results have suggested a reasonable improvement over traditional methods in predicting rainfall. The proposed HNN model outperformed the compared models by achieving 84.26% accuracy without feature selection and 89.54% accuracy with feature selection.