An integrated intelligent technique for monthly rainfall time series prediction

This paper proposes a methodology to create an interpretable fuzzy model for monthly rainfall time series prediction. The proposed methodology incorporates the advantages of artificial neural network, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm. In the first step, the differences between the time series data are calculated and they are used to define the interval between the membership functions of a Mamdani-type fuzzy inference system. Next, artificial neural network is used to develop the model from input-output data and the established model is then used to extract the fuzzy rules. The parameters of the created fuzzy model are then optimized by using genetic algorithm. The proposed model was applied to eight monthly rainfall time series data in the northeast region of Thailand. The experimental results showed that the proposed model provided satisfactory prediction accuracy when compared to other commonly-used prediction models. Due to the interpretability nature of the model, human analysts can gain insight knowledge of the data to be modeled.