Predicting Rainfall using Data-Driven Time Series Approaches

Rainfall plays a significant role in agricultural farming and is considered one of the major natural sources for all living things.  The increase in greenhouse emissions and change in climatic conditions have an adverse effect on the rainfall patterns. Therefore, it becomes crucial to analyze the changing patterns and to forecast rainfall  to mitigate natural disasters that could be caused by the unexpected heavy rainfalls. This paper aims to compare the performance of seven states of the art time series models namely Moving Average(MA), Naïve Forecast(NF), Simple Exponential(SE), Holt’s Linear(HL), Holt’s Linear Additive(HLA), Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average(ARIMA), Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average(SARIMA) for the prediction of rainfall. The historical monthly rainfall data from six different stations in United Arab Emirates (UAE) was obtained to assess the performance of seven techniques. Experimental results show that ARIMA outperforms all the prediction models with a mean square error (RMSE) of 9.49 followed by Holt’s Linear model with an RMSE value of 9.91. The performance of all the models is comparable and shows promising performance in rainfall prediction. This also shows the ability of these models to predict the rainfall in arid regions like the UAE