Hybrid Wavelet-Postfix-GP Model for Rainfall Prediction of Anand Region of India

Abstract

An accurate prediction of rainfall is crucial for national economy and management of water resources. The variability of rainfall in both time and space makes the rainfall prediction a challenging task. The present work investigates the applicability of a hybrid wavelet-postfix-GP model for daily rainfall prediction of Anand region using meteorological variables. The wavelet analysis is used as a data preprocessing technique to remove the stochastic (noise) component from the original time series of each meteorological variable. The Postfix-GP, a GP variant, and ANN are then employed to develop models for rainfall using newly generated subseries of meteorological variables.The developed models are then used for rainfall prediction.The out-of-sample prediction performance of Postfix-GP and ANN models is compared using statistical measures. The results are comparable and suggest that Postfix-GP could be explored as an alternative tool for rainfall prediction.