Rainfall and runoff forecasting with SSA–SVM approach

Abstract

Real time operation studies such as reservoir operation, flood forecasting, etc., necessitates good forecasts of the associated hydrologic variable(s). A significant improvement in such forecasting can be obtained by suitable pre-processing. In this study, a simple and efficient prediction technique based on Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) coupled with Support Vector Machine (SVM) is proposed. While SSA decomposes original time series into a set of high and low frequency components, SVM helps in efficiently dealing with the computational and generalization performance in a high-dimensional input space. The proposed technique is applied to predict the Tryggevælde catchment runoff data (Denmark) and the Singapore rainfall data as case studies. The results are compared with that of the non-linear prediction (NLP) method. The comparisons show that the proposed technique yields a significantly higher accuracy in the prediction than that of NLP.