Abstract:A neural network with two hidden layers is developed to forecast typhoon rainfall. First, the model configuration is evaluated using eight typhoon characteristics. The forecasts for two typhoons based on only the typhoon characteristics are capable of showing the trend of rainfall when a typhoon is nearby. Furthermore, the influence of spatial rainfall information on rainfall forecasting is considered for improving the model design. A semivariogram is also applied to determine the required number of nearby rain gauges whose rainfall information will be used as input to the model. With the typhoon characteristics and the spatial rainfall information as input to the model, the forecasting model can produce reasonable forecasts. It is also found that too much spatial rainfall information cannot improve the generalization ability of the model, because the inclusion of irrelevant information adds noise to the network and undermines the performance of the network.
Abstract:Based on a combination of a radial basis function network (RBFN) and a self-organizing map (SOM), a time-series forecasting model is proposed. Traditionally, the positioning of the radial basis centres is a crucial problem for the RBFN. In the proposed model, an SOM is used to construct the two-dimensional feature map from which the number of clusters (i.e. the number of hidden units in the RBFN) can be figured out directly by eye, and then the radial basis centres can be determined easily. The proposed model is examined using simulated time series data. The results demonstrate that the proposed RBFN is more competent in modelling and forecasting time series than an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model. Finally, the proposed model is applied to actual groundwater head data. It is found that the proposed model can forecast more precisely than the ARIMA model. For time series forecasting, the proposed model is recommended as an alternative to the existing method, because it has a simple structure and can produce reasonable forecasts.
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