Forecasting Thailand’s Precipitation with Cascading Model of CNN and GRU

Precipitation prediction is necessary to use in water management, especially in Thailand, it can be applied for various ways, such as flood warning, agriculture planning, etc. There are many prior attempts to forecast rainfall from the rain-gauge station. Some deployed traditional machine learning approaches: ARIMA, k-NN, etc. Recently, deep learning approach has shown promising results in this task. However, the accuracy is still limited since the raining period throughout the year in Thailand is very scarce, so most rainfall amount is zero. In this paper, we propose to cascade two deep learning networks to tackle this problem: one is a classification model to classify whether it rains or not, and the other is a regression model to predict rainfall amount. Our network is a combination of CNN and GRU, where CNN aims to capture relationship between various sensors and GRU aims to capture time-series information. Furthermore, we also perform multi-step forecasting by applying a rolling mechanism that uses the predicted rainfall and involved features to predict the next 6 steps. The experiment was conducted on hourly rainfall dataset for 6 years (2013-2018) provided from the public government sector in Thailand. We use RMSE as performance metric to evaluate three periods of rainfall: Overall, Rain, and non-rain periods and the results show that our cascading model is the winner with only 4.53% in term of RMSE which is the average percentage of difference from over all regions.