Droughts, with their increasing frequency of occurrence, continue to negatively affect livelihoods and elements at risk. For example, the 2011 in drought in east Africa has caused massive losses document to have cost the Kenyan economy over $12bn. With the foregoing, the demand for ex-ante drought monitoring systems is ever-increasing. The study uses 10 precipitation and vegetation variables that are lagged over 1, 2 and 3-month time-steps to predict drought situations. In the model space search for the most predictive artificial neural network (ANN) model, as opposed to the traditional greedy search for the most predictive variables, we use the General Additive Model (GAM) approach. Together with a set of assumptions, we thereby reduce the cardinality of the space of models. Even though we build a total of 102 GAM models, only 21 have R 2 greater than 0.7 and are thus subjected to the ANN process. The ANN process itself uses the brute-force approach that automatically partitions the training data into 10 sub-samples, builds the ANN models in these samples and evaluates their performance using multiple metrics. The results show the superiority of 1-month lag of the variables as compared to longer time lags of 2 and 3 months. The champion ANN model recorded an R 2 of 0.78 in model testing using the out-of-sample data. This illustrates its ability to be a good predictor of drought situations 1-month ahead. Investigated as a classifier, the champion has a modest accuracy of 66% and a multi-class area under the ROC curve (AUROC) of 89.99%
There is increasing need for highly predictive and stable models for the prediction of drought as an aid to better planning for drought response. This paper presents the performance of both homogenous and heterogenous model ensembles in the prediction of drought severity using the study case techniques of artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector regression (SVR). For each of the homogenous and heterogenous model ensembles, the study investigates the performance of three model ensembling approaches: linear averaging (non-weighted), ranked weighted averaging and model stacking using artificial neural networks. Using the approach of "over-produce then select", the study used 17 years of data on 16 selected variables for predictive drought monitoring to build 244 individual ANN and SVR models from which 111 models were selected for the building of the model ensembles. The results indicate marginal superiority of heterogenous to homogenous model ensembles. Model stacking is shown to realize models that are superior in performance in the prediction of future vegetation conditions as compared to the linear averaging and weighted averaging approaches. The best performance from the heterogenous stacked model ensembles recorded an R 2 of 0.94 in the prediction of future vegetation conditions as compared to an R 2 of 0.83 and R 2 of 0.78 for both ANN and SVR respectively in the traditional champion model approaches to the realization of predictive models. We conclude that despite the computational resource intensiveness of the model ensembling approach to drought prediction, the returns in terms of model performance is worth the investment, especially in the context of the recent exponential increase in computational power.
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