Binary classification of rainfall time-series using machine learning algorithms

Summer monsoon rainfall contributes more than 75% of the annual rainfall in India. For the state of Maharashtra, India, this is more than 80% for almost all regions of the state. The high variability of rainfall during this period necessitates the classification of rainy and non-rainy days. While there are various approaches to rainfall classification, this paper proposes rainfall classification based on weather variables. This paper explores the use of support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms for the binary classification of summer monsoon rainfall using common weather variables such as relative humidity, temperature, pressure. The daily data, for the summer monsoon months, for nineteen years, was collected for the Shivajinagar station of Pune in the state of Maharashtra, India. Classification accuracy of 82.1 and 82.8%, respectively, was achieved with SVM and ANN algorithms, for an imbalanced dataset. While performance parameters such as misclassification rate, F1 score indicate that better results were achieved with ANN, model parameter selection for SVM was less involved than ANN. Domain adaptation technique was used for rainfall classification at the other two stations of Maharashtra with the network trained for the Shivajinagar station. Satisfactory results for these two stations were obtained only after changing the training method for SVM and ANN.