RfGanNet: An efficient rainfall prediction method for India and its clustered regions using RfGan and deep convolutional neural networks

Early rainfall prediction is very important to ensure the economic balance of any agriculture-dominated country, such as India. Deep learning has recently received considerable attention for predicting rainfall using historical data. However, rainfall depends on multiple factors like ElNino, rising sea levels, warming of the Atlantic Ocean, etc. The changing climate has also significantly increased rainfall variability. The current deep-learning approaches are either based on a limited set of predictors or do not utilize the time-series properties for the recurrence of similar climate conditions every 12 months. Besides, they perform poorly in predicting accurate rainfall estimates for the diverse areas of India due to limited data availability across various regions. Therefore, this paper presents a groundbreaking solution to address the challenge of limited data by introducing RfGan (Rainfall GAN), a novel variant of generative adversarial networks. RfGan aims to fulfill the crucial need for abundant data to ensure the effectiveness of model training. Moreover, a novel rainfall prediction method, RfGanNet, has been introduced that leverages the strengths of the proposed RfGan for data augmentation, long-short-term memory, and convolutional neural networks for rainfall prediction. The performance of RfGanNet has been validated for India and its clustered regions in terms of nine parameters: precision, recall, specificity, Matthews correlation coefficient, accuracy, F1-score, mean absolute error, mean square error and computation time. The experimental results of RfGan are compared against original and synthetic datasets generated from state-of-the-art methods, namely tabular gan (TGAN), Wasserstein gan (WGAN), and conditional tabular gan (CTGAN). The experimental results indicate that the proposed RfNet model, when trained using RfGan-generated data, surpassed all the other considered methods by achieving 97.22 % accuracy. Moreover, RfNet has been compared with other related deep Learning approaches to validate its efficacy. Additionally, an ablation study investigating various LSTM-CNN combinations has been conducted. The findings of the study indicate that oceanic and climate-related predictors have a noteworthy influence on Indian rainfall. Moreover, the study highlights the suitability of combining Bidirectional LSTM, CNN, and multiple predictors for accurate rainfall prediction.