Intelligent Fuzzy Models: WM, ANFIS, and Patch Learning for the Competitive Forecasting of Environmental Variables

Abstract

This paper focuses on the application of fuzzy modeling methods in the field of environmental engineering. Since predicting meteorological data is considered to be a challenging task, the current work aimed to assess the performance of various fuzzy models on temperature, solar radiation, and wind speed forecasting. The models studied were taken from the fuzzy systems literature, varying from well-established to the most recent methods. Four cases were considered: a Wang–Mendel (WM)-based fuzzy predictive model, an adaptive network fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), a fuzzy system ensemble, and patch learning (PL). The prediction systems were built from input/output data without any prior information, in a model-free approach. The ability of the models to display high performance on complex real datasets, provided by the National Observatory of Athens, was demonstrated through numerical studies. Patch learning managed to not only display a similar approximation ability to that of strong machine learning models, such as support vector machines and Gaussian processes, but also outperform them on the highly demanding problem of wind speed prediction. More accurately, as far as wind speed prediction is concerned, patch learning produced a 0.9211 root mean squared error for the training data and a value of 0.9841 for the testing data. The support vector machine provided a 0.9306 training root mean squared error and a 0.9891 testing value. The Gaussian process model resulted in a 0.9343 root mean squared error for the training data and a value of 0.9861 for the testing data. Finally, as shown by the numerical experiments, the fuzzy system ensemble exhibited the highest generalisation performance among all the intelligent models.