Short-term daily precipitation forecasting with seasonally-integrated autoencoder
This addresses the problem of accurate short-term precipitation forecasting for activities like urban management and flood prevention, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods.
The study tackled short-term daily precipitation forecasting by developing a seasonally-integrated autoencoder (SSAE) that handles nonlinearities and seasonality, resulting in outperformance over various time series models and improved correlation from 4% to 37% at different horizons.
Short-term precipitation forecasting is essential for planning of human activities in multiple scales, ranging from individuals' planning, urban management to flood prevention. Yet the short-term atmospheric dynamics are highly nonlinear that it cannot be easily captured with classical time series models. On the other hand, deep learning models are good at learning nonlinear interactions, but they are not designed to deal with the seasonality in time series. In this study, we aim to develop a forecasting model that can both handle the nonlinearities and detect the seasonality hidden within the daily precipitation data. To this end, we propose a seasonally-integrated autoencoder (SSAE) consisting of two long short-term memory (LSTM) autoencoders: one for learning short-term dynamics, and the other for learning the seasonality in the time series. Our experimental results show that not only does the SSAE outperform various time series models regardless of the climate type, but it also has low output variance compared to other deep learning models. The results also show that the seasonal component of the SSAE helped improve the correlation between the forecast and the actual values from 4% at horizon 1 to 37% at horizon 3.