HYDROL 3876

Journal of Hydrology 227 (2000) 5665 www.elsevier.com/locate/jhydrol

A study of optimal model lag and spatial inputs to articial neural network for rainfall forecasting
K.C. Luk, J.E. Ball*, A. Sharma
Water Research Laboratory, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia Received 7 December 1998; received in revised form 25 August 1999; accepted 23 September 1999

Abstract Articial neural networks (ANNs), which emulate the parallel distributed processing of the human nervous system, have proven to be very successful in dealing with complicated problems, such as function approximation and pattern recognition. Due to their powerful capability and functionality, ANNs provide an alternative approach for many engineering problems that are difcult to solve by conventional approaches. Rainfall forecasting has been a difcult subject in hydrology due to the complexity of the physical processes involved and the variability of rainfall in space and time. In this study, ANNs were adopted to forecast short-term rainfall for an urban catchment. The ANNs were trained to recognise historical rainfall patterns as recorded from a number of gauges in the study catchment for reproduction of relevant patterns for new rainstorm events. The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of temporal and spatial information on short-term rainfall forecasting. To achieve this aim, a comparison test on the forecast accuracy was made among the ANNs congured with different orders of lag and different numbers of spatial inputs. In developing the ANNs with alternative congurations, the ANNs were trained to an optimal level to achieve good generalisation of data. It was found in this study that the ANNs provided the most accurate predictions when an optimum number of spatial inputs was included into the network, and that the network with lower lag consistently produced better performance. 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Hydroinformatics; Neural networks; GIS; Rainfall; Precipitation

1. Introduction Flash ooding is a life-threatening phenomenon. One way to reduce the risk to life and to alleviate economic losses is to provide advance warnings to people likely to be affected by ash oods. A ood warning system consists of three interlinked modules: a data collection module which collects rainfall data at strategic locations within the catchment; a forecasting module that forecasts the rainfall
* Corresponding author. Fax: 61-299494188. E-mail address: j.ball@unsw.edu.au (J.E. Ball). 0022-1694/00/$ - see front matter PII: S0022-1694(99 )00 165-1

based on observed rainfall and other relevant hydro-meteorological factors; and a rainfallrunoff module that translates the observed and forecast rainfalls into corresponding ow values. While a number of studies have been conducted to ascertain the utility of alternative model approaches in the third (rainfallrunoff) module, studies investigating alternative approaches for the second (rainfall forecasting) module are few. Rainfall forecasts at short (530 min) intervals are of added importance in the case of small, urbanised catchments (Lettenmaier and Wood, 1993). Such

2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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catchments are characterised by a fast hydrologic response due to their size and a relatively high fraction of effective impervious surface. Developing a ood warning system for such catchments is not a simple task. While the process of converting rainfall to runoff poses a series of difculties in itself, forecasting future rainfall on a small spatial scale is fraught with errors of a considerably higher magnitude. Although a physically based approach for rainfall forecasting has several advantages, given the short time scale, the small catchment area, and the massive costs associated with collecting the required meteorological data, it is not a feasible alternative in most cases. A statistically based approach that attempts to model the pattern of the underlying physical attributes manifested in the observed rainfall data is an efcient alternative. Proposed herein is one such alternative to forecast the future spatial distribution of rainfall over a catchment using an Articial Neural Network (ANN). The rainfall forecasting approach presented herein has been discussed previously by Luk et al. (1999) who described the use and implementation of alternate forms of ANNs to the rainfall forecasting problem. The approach presented by Luk et al. (1999) is used in this study to investigate the necessary spatial and temporal data for the ANN. The ANN approach has evolved as a branch of articial intelligence and is now a recognised tool to model underlying complexities in any articial or physical system. The ANN is based on a model of the human neurological system which consists of a series of basic computing elements (called neurons) interconnected together to allow recognition of incidents that have had a similar pattern to the current input. With this parallel-distributed processing architecture, ANNs have proven to be very powerful computational tools that excel in pattern recognition and function approximation. As shown by Hornik et al. (1989), an ANN with sufcient complexity is capable of approximating any smooth function to any desired degree of accuracy. In addition, ANNs are computationally robust, having the ability to learn and to generalise from examples to produce meaningful solutions to problems even when the input data contain errors or are incomplete. The application of an ANN, however, involves a complicated development process. If carelessly used, an ANN can

easily learn irrelevant information (noises) in the system, with the resulted ANN model being able to predict past incidents but unable to predict future events. The ANN modelling framework has been used increasingly in various aspects of science and engineering because of its ability to model both linear and nonlinear systems without the need to make any assumptions as are implicit in most traditional statistical approaches. Some of the hydrologic problems ANNs have been used for include rainfallrunoff modelling (Hsu et al., 1995; Smith and Eli, 1995; Achela et al., 1998), scheduling of hydroelectric power systems (Saad and Bigras 1996), and river ow prediction (Karunanithi et al., 1994; Zhu and Fujita, 1994). The ANN methodology has been applied also to forecast rainfall; for example, French et al. (1992) used synthetically generated rainfall storms to calibrate an ANN model and then generated plausible rainfall sequences that could occur over a catchment using a physically based rainfall to validate the ANN. While similar in spirit to the French et al. (1992) paper, this study focuses on the problems faced in developing an ANN based rainfall forecasting model using observed rainfall records in both space and time. As such, this paper aims at identifying an optimal set of spatio-temporal inputs for an ANN rainfall forecasting model.

2. The articial neural network approach 2.1. Overview An ANN is a computational approach inspired by studies of the brain and nervous systems in biological organisms. The powerful functionality of a biological neural system has been attributed to the paralleldistributed processing nature of the biological neurons. An ANN emulates this structure by distributing computations to small and simple processing units, called articial neurons, which are interconnected to form a network. A simple ANN is shown in Fig. 1 to illustrate this basic structure and terminology. As shown in Fig. 1, an ANN consists of layers of articial neurons or nodes. A layer can be seen as a group of nodes, which share the same input and output

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Fig. 1. A simple three-layer ANN.

connections, but do not interconnect with other nodes in the same layer. In other words, connections occur only between layers and not within a layer. Three generic types of layers are presented in an ANN. The rst layer, which receives input information, is called an input layer. The last layer, which produces output information, is called an output layer. Between the input and output layers are the hidden layers. Within an ANN, there can be one or more hidden layers. Information is transmitted through the connections between nodes in different layers. In a simple situation, the information, or signal, is passed forward only as is shown in the ANN illustrated in Fig. 1. This type of network is called a feedforward network, or multi-layer feedforward network (MLFN). Mathematically, a three-layer MLFN with I input nodes, J hidden nodes, and K output nodes, can be expressed as: H 2 I 3I J wi xi e 1 yk S1 d wj S2
j1 i1

The main control parameters of a MLFN, and in general for any ANN, are the connection weights. The process of estimating these parameters is known as training where optimal connection weights are determined by minimising an objective function. An ANN is a powerful yet exible nonlinear model, which has at its core simple processing elements that collectively produce complex nonlinear behaviour. The exibility of an ANN comes from the fact that the number of hidden nodes or even the number of hidden layers can be easily changed to adjust the computational power of an ANN. This exibility allows the modelling of complex systems even though there is little knowledge about the form of relationship between the independent and dependent variables. This, together with other advantages of ANNs, motivates the application of ANNs for short-term rainfall forecasting. 2.2. Articial neural network for rainfall forecasting 2.2.1. A Markovian process Rainfall is a natural process that has a high degree of variability in both time and space. For development of the proposed rainfall forecast model, the rainfall process was assumed to be a Markovian process, implying that the rainfall value at a given location in space and time is a function of a nite set of previous realisations. With this assumption, an underlying model structure can be expressed as: xt 1 f xt; xt et 1; xt 2; ; xt k 1 3

where yk are the outputs from the network; xi the inputs to the network; wi the connection weights between nodes of the input and hidden layers; wj the connection weights between nodes of the hidden and output layers; and s1 and s2 are activation functions; the most commonly used function is a logistic sigmoid function given by sx 1 1 e
x

where t is a time index with a positive integer value; xt x1t ; x2t ; ; xNt T represents a vector of rainfall values x1t ; x2t ; ; xNt at N different gauging locations at time t, where T denotes the transpose operator; f( ) a nonlinear mapping function, which will be approximated using ANNs; e(t) a mapping error (to be minimised); and k an unknown number of past realisations contributing to rainfall at the next time-step. Usually, k is referred to as the lag of a network. If k is equal to 1, the future rainfall is related only to the present rainfall, representing a lag-1 network. The number of spatial inputs (N) is also a crucial factor to be determined.

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There are a number of alternative ANNs which can be used to represent the rainfall forecasting model. Luk et al. (1999) review three alternative ANN model congurations for the purpose of rainfall forecasting: Multi-layer Feedforward Neural Network (MLFN)which is the basic ANN conguration. Elman Partial Recurrent Neural Network (Elman)which provides a feedback scheme that allows transfer of information from the hidden layers to the preceding input layer. This simulates a longer memory process in the forecast model. Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN)which provides a time lagged basis for model input thus allowing an efcient way of modelling higher lag dependence in the ANN, and at the same time reducing the number of parameters. In the previous study, it was shown that when the MLFNs were properly developed, comparable performance with more advanced networks for short-term rainfall forecasting could be achieved. The MLFN was adopted therefore for the analysis of network lag and spatial complexity due to its simplicity and computational efciency. A MLFN is a straightforward approach to represent the rainfall model in Eq. (3). Shown in Fig. 2 is the generic structure of MLFNs developed during this study for rainfall forecasting. The MLFN is presented

with the current and past rainfall values as inputs, i.e. xt; ; xt k 1; where x(t) represents a vector of rainfall values at M gauge locations at time t. The value of k, as previously noted, is referred to as the lag of the network and is a key variable to be determined. The number of hidden nodes (H), which denes the complexity of the network, is another parameter which has to be evaluated. The output nodes of the network consist of the rainfall values one timestep ahead at N gauge locations. Note that the number of inputs (M) is not necessarily equal to the number of outputs (N). In fact, in this study, the number of inputs were treated as a variable which was tested for its effect on the accuracy of rainfall forecast at a single station. 3. Application to the study catchment 3.1. The study catchment The Upper Parramatta River Catchment, shown in Fig. 3, is located in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. The total catchment area is approximately 112 km 2. Within the catchment area, the dominant land use is typical of urban environments with a mix of residential, commercial, industrial and open space (parkland) areas. Considerable development has occurred over the past two decades, which has resulted in an increase in the frequency of recorded

Fig. 2. A MLFN for rainfall forecasting.

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Fig. 3. The Upper Parramatta River Catchment.

ood levels. To mitigate the social and economic losses associated with ood events in this catchment, the Upper Parramatta River Catchment Trust (UPRCT) was instituted in 1989 with the task of managing ood mitigation measures and other water management issues within the catchment. There are 16 continuous rain gauges within the Upper Parramatta River Catchment Area; the locations of these gauges are shown in Fig. 3. The majority of these gauges have been installed by the UPRCT since its formation. Consequently, long-term records are not available from these gauges. Rainfall records at 15-min intervals for the 16 rain gauges were available from January 1991 to September 1996. From these records, a total of 34 storm events were selected using, as a criterion, only storm events where the daily rainfall exceeded 20 mm. The data series were extracted in 15-min intervals with the total number of rainfall values extracted being 1749. Among the 34 storms, more than 70% of the storms were identied as convective events. The remaining storms were frontal events. The convective storms occurred mostly during Summer and Autumn in Sydney, while the frontal storms were more evenly distributed over the four seasons.

3.2. Methodology 3.2.1. Model calibration An important aspect in the development of an ANN is to ensure the network extracts the necessary features from the data. This is referred to as training of the ANN. Training involves calibrating the parameters of an ANN using a part of the available data set, referred to as the training data set. During training the data are presented repetitively to the network until the parameter values are determined such that the network output adequately reproduces the training data. The epoch of the training cycle is the number of times the training data has been presented to the network. When to stop training, or how many epochs to use, is a crucial decision in the conguration of an ANN. Too much training results in over-training or a high variance in the network. Inadequate training causes bias in the network. Bishop (1995) discussed the concept of bias-variance trade-off. This concept provides insight into the complexity of an ANN in relation to generalisation of data. The bias measures the extent to which the average of the network outputs differs from the desired outputs. Conversely the variance measures the extent to which the network outputs are sensitive to the particular choice of data

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set. Thus, a simple network has high bias but low variance. On the other hand, a complex network has low bias but high variance. Therefore, the complexity of a network needs to be constrained in order to reduce the variance as, in most cases of ANN training, a large number of parameters have to be evaluated. In many reported studies, such as that by French et al. (1992), training is stopped when a predetermined minimum error is reached. There are, however, two major problems with this approach. The rst problem is that it is difcult to set a priori a minimum error for training. The second problem is that this approach is inherently time-consuming. After training has been completed, if an evaluation shows that the performance of the network is unsatisfactory, it is necessary to re-train the network and then re-evaluate the new network. This involves a lengthy trial and error process. A practical approach to the resolution of these problems is the early stopping technique which is discussed by Sarle (1995). The early stopping technique provides an efcient way to constrain the training of an ANN. In essence, this technique monitors the progress of the network training using a second data set. The available data is thus divided into three sets: (1) training set; (2) monitoring set; and (3) validation

set. The training set is used to train the network, that is to calibrate the weights of the network, while the monitoring set is used to check the progress of the network to dene the epoch at which training should be stopped. The validation set is used for nal evaluation of the network performance. The concept of early stopping is illustrated in Fig. 4. Shown in this gure is a typical error curve for a training set and a monitoring set. Training is stopped when the error in the monitoring set reaches a minimum value. At this point the network has achieved the best generalisation. If training is not stopped, the network will be over-trained and the performance of the network will deteriorate despite the error of the training data still decreasing. The manner in which the early stopping technique avoids over-training is best explained through a discussion of the training of a network. Suppose a network is selected for training and initialised with random weights. At the beginning of training, some weights are adjusted to minimise the error between the network outputs and the targets. These adjusted parameters are called effective weights because they contribute signicantly to improving the performance of the network. As training progresses, the number of effective weights grows. The error in both the training

Fig. 4. Errors in training and monitoring.

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and monitoring data set will gradually decrease as the network generalises features from the training data. As training progresses further and beyond a point, the network activates more weights than necessary and starts to t the noise of the training data. Consequently, a further decrease in the training error occurs but an increase in the monitoring error is observed. Therefore, the location of the minimum of the monitoring error determines when the network achieves an optimal number of effective weights. For this study, the maximum epoch, or the maximum number of repetitions of the training data set to calibrate the network weights was set at 1000. During training, the network was checked every 100 epochs against the monitoring data. Training was stopped when the error in the monitoring data reached its lowest value, or the training reached the maximum epoch, whichever came rst. Finally, the networks were evaluated using the validation data set. 3.3. Activation functions and data pre-processing An activation function is applied on each node of an ANN to map the input signals to produce outputs within a predened range of values to facilitate computation or interpretation. If an appropriate activation function is chosen, the performance of an ANN will be greatly enhanced. For this study, a sigmoid activation function was used for the hidden nodes, but a linear activation function was found necessary for the output nodes. The use of sigmoid function was to enable nonlinearity of the network. The sigmoid function, however, was not adopted for output nodes because the sigmoid function forces an output to be bounded over a range of 0.01.0. This means that the output variable has to be scaled by a known maximum value. This is undesirable for rainfall forecasting since the maximum rainfall value usually is not known. If the probable maximum rainfall is chosen, the majority rainfall values will be scaled to an excessively narrow range. To overcome this situation, a linear activation function was used. Training of an ANN involves optimisation of the outputs by adjusting the connection weights of the network. This is essentially an optimisation problem in a multi-dimensional space. The dimension of the problem is a function of the number of connection

weights. In order to achieve an effective ANN training, the rainfall data were transformed by the logarithmic function to improve the numerical condition of the optimisation problem z a log10 x b 4

where a is an arbitrary constant. A value of 0.5 was used in this study; and b was set to 1 to avoid the entry of zero rainfall in the log function. The nal forecast results were transformed back to original rainfall values by the inverse of Eq. (4), which is: x 10z=a b: 5

3.3.1. Network performance indicator The normalised mean squared error (NMSE) was chosen as the performance indicator. This indicator is determined from Dnp Znp 2 N P NMSE Dnp Dnp 2
N P

1 Dnp NPs2 N P

Znp 2

where N is the number of output nodes; P the number of patterns; Znp the networks outputs in transformed values; Dnp the target outputs in transformed values; and s 2 the variance of the target outputs in transformed values. The NMSE in Eq. (6) is the sum of squared errors normalised by the number of patterns over all output nodes and the estimated variance of the data. If one subtracts the NMSE by unity, the result would be a statistic similar to the coefcient of determination (R 2) of the ANN model. An NMSE of zero indicates a perfect t of the model to the recorded data, while an NMSE of innity suggests the poorest model possible. 4. Discussion of test results The objective of this investigation was to identify the spatial and temporal data necessary for accurate rainfall forecasts. To achieve this objective, an

K.C. Luk et al. / Journal of Hydrology 227 (2000) 5665 Table 1 Comparison of model lag No. of hidden nodes Normalised mean squared error on validation events Lag 1 2 4 8 16 24 32 64 128 0.642 0.664 0.664 0.664 0.635 0.649 0.648 0.706 Lag 2 0.660 0.662 0.659 0.668 0.677 0.660 0.745 0.802 Lag 3 0.679 0.672 0.680 0.724 0.701 0.683 0.869 1.042 Lag 4 0.653 0.728 0.687 0.733 0.740 0.717 0.872 1.291

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independent analysis was undertaken to ascertain the optimal lag (k value) for a network and to ascertain the extent of spatial rainfall information. The number of closest rainfall gauges was used an analogy for the extent of spatial information incorporated into the ANN. The rst set of model congurations evaluated used all rain gauges in formulating the forecast model. The ANN model structure illustrated in Fig. 2 was used, with 16 gauge inputs, i.e. the total number of rain

gauges in the Upper Parrammatta River catchment. Different orders of k were tried to arrive at the optimal model lag. Results from this study are presented in Table 1. Shown in each row of this table are the results from networks congured with different time lags for a given number of hidden nodes. In general the networks with lower lags resulted in lower normalised mean squared errors (NMSE), and the lag-1 networks had the least NMSE. This might indicate that the 15-min rainfall time series available in this study do not have long-term memory characteristics. As a next step in improving the model design, the effect of nearby rain gauges on the forecast at any given location in the catchment was considered. The following strategy, illustrated in Fig. 5, was applied. A gauge (reference number 7261) located at the centre of the catchment is selected to demonstrate the procedure. Shown in Fig. 5 are the positions of the gauges and their distances relative to gauge number 7261. For simplicity, only the relationships between gauge number 7261 and its neighbouring gauges are shown in Fig. 5 although the other gauges were considered during the analyses discussed herein. Initially, the input and the output of the network were the rainfall at the gauge itself. Then, inputs

Fig. 5. Sequence of neighbour gauges.

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Table 2 Comparison of spatial and temporal inputs Spatial variation Normalised mean squared error on validation events Lag 1 No neighbour inputs Two neighbour inputs Four neighbour inputs Six neighbour inputs Eight neighbour inputs 10 neighbour inputs 12 neighbour inputs 15 neighbour inputs 0.679 0.641 0.635 0.631 0.630 0.639 0.650 0.644 Lag 2 0.686 0.650 0.642 0.656 0.659 0.676 0.682 0.683 Lag 3 0.678 0.655 0.662 0.663 0.665 0.685 0.691 0.719

from neighbouring gauges were gradually added to the network, with the only output being gauge number 7261. The number of neighbouring gauges that were used as input to the ANNs were 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 15, respectively. The sequence of neighbour gauges being used as input to the network is shown in Fig. 5; the priority of selection was according to the shortest distance between the gauges and gauge 7261. For example, the rst two gauges added to the input were gauge numbers 7265 and 7269.

The above procedure was carried out in turn for each of the 16 gauges. The results are summarised and presented in Table 2. For simplicity, only the networks congured with two hidden nodes were presented. As shown in Table 2, there existed an optimal limit of spatial information for inclusion into the network. Either too much or too little spatial information introduced to the network would result in decreased performance. For the lag-1 networks the optimal spatial inputs were eight, which had the least normalised mean squared error for the validation events; For lag-2 networks the optimal spatial inputs were four; and for lag-3 networks the optimal spatial inputs were two. In order to give some indications of the performance of the networks, a selective plot of forecasts is given in Fig. 6. Shown in Fig. 6 is a comparison of the accuracy of rainfall forecasts among three lag-1 networks congured with three different spatial inputs. The rainfall hyetograph showed in the gure represented the rainfall depth in 15-min increments at a gauge site during the validation storm event on 6 January 1996. The one time-step (15 min) ahead forecasts produced by the three alternative networks were

Fig. 6. Comparison of spatial inputs for forecasting rainfall for the storm event on 6 January 1996.

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shown by points with different symbols. In general, the network congured with eight neighbour inputs produced the most accurate forecasts of the rainfall. It is interesting to observe that the inclusion of spatial information improved the accuracy of forecasts. This effect can be clearly seen at those points one time-step after the actual rainfall depth with a value of 0.5 mm. The forecasts produced by the network without neighbouring inputs were always at a constant value of 0.48 mm. This is due to the mapping of a single rainfall value from the previous time step. For those networks with neighbour inputs, however, the forecasts were not constant since the networks took into account of the spatial information; consequently more accurate forecasts were produced. The inclusion of more neighbouring gauges, however, may introduce the following side effects: Additional gauge inputs produce additional connection weights, resulting in a more complicated network. The gauges far away from the point of interest have little relation to the point of interest. The inclusion of irrelevant information would add noises to the network and this would undermine the networks performance.

networks, the optimal number was eight; for lag-2 networks, the number was four; and for lag-3 networks, the number was two. It seemed that there was a trade-off between temporal and spatial information. For the available rainfall data in this study, the best-performed network was a lag-1 network with input from the eight nearest neighbouring gauges.

References
Achela, D., Fernando, K., Jayawardena, A.W., 1998. Runoff forecasting using RBF networks with OLS algorithm. ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering 3 (3), 203209. Bishop, C.M., 1995. Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 482 pages. French, M., Krajewski, W., Cuykendall, R.R., 1992. Rainfall forecasting in space and time using a neural network. Journal of Hydrology 137, 131. Hornik, K., Stinchcombe, M., White, H., 1989. Multilayer feedforward networks are universal approximators. Neural Networks 2, 359366. Hsu, K.L., Gupta, V., Sorooshian, S., 1995. Articial neural network modeling of the rainfallrunoff process. Water Resources Research 31 (10), 25172530. Karunanithi, N., Grenney, W.J., Whitley, D., Bovee, K., 1994. Neural networks for river ow prediction. Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering 8 (2), 201220. Lettenmaier, D.P., Wood, E.F., 1993. Hydrologic forecasting. In: Maidment, D.R. (Ed.). Handbook of Hydrology, McGraw-Hill, New York, chap. 26. Luk, K.C., Ball, J.E., Sharma, A., 1999. An application of articial neural networks for rainfall forecasting. Mathematical and Computer Modelling, in press. Saad, M., Bigras, P., 1996. Fuzzy learning decomposition for the scheduling of hydroelectric power systems. Water Resources Research 32 (1), 179186. Sarle, W.S., 1995. Stopped training and other remedies for overtting. Proceedings of the 27th Symposium on the Interface of Computing Science and Statistics, pp. 352360. Smith, J., Eli, R.N., 1995. Neural-network models of rainfallrunoff process. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 121 (6), 499508. Zhu, M.L., Fujita, M., 1994. Comparisons between fuzzy reasoning and neural network methods to forecast runoff discharge. Journal of Hydroscience and Hydraulic Engineering 12 (2), 131141.

5. Conclusion Short-term rainfall forecasting using ANNs is the focus of this study. An investigation of the effect of temporal and spatial inputs revealed that there existed an optimal limit of temporal and spatial information for inclusion into the network. The following were derived from the test results of this study: The 15-min multiple site rainfall time series of this study might not have long-term memory characteristics as revealed by the networks with lower lags consistently producing smaller prediction errors. As for the spatial domain, either too much or too little spatial information introduced to the network would result in a decreased performance. For lag-1