Comparison of random forests and support vector machine for real-time radar-derived rainfall forecasting

This study aims to compare two machine learning techniques, random forests (RF) and support vector machine (SVM), for real-time radar-derived rainfall forecasting. The real-time radar-derived rainfall forecasting models use the present grid-based radar-derived rainfall as the output variable and use antecedent grid-based radar-derived rainfall, grid position (longitude and latitude) and elevation as the input variables to forecast 1- to 3-h ahead rainfalls for all grids in a catchment. Grid-based radar derived rainfalls of six typhoon events during 2012-2015 in three reservoir catchments of Taiwan are collected for model training and verifying. Two kinds of forecasting models are constructed and compared, which are single-mode forecasting model (SMFM) and multiple-mode forecasting model (MMFM) based on RF and SVM. The SMFM uses the same model for 1- to 3-h ahead rainfall forecasting; the MMFM uses three different models for 1- to 3-h ahead forecasting. According to forecasting performances, it reveals that the SMFMs give better performances than MMFM5 and both SVM-based and RF-based SMFMs show satisfactory performances for 1-h ahead forecasting. However, for 2- and 3-h ahead forecasting, it is found that the RF-based SMFM underestimates the observed radar-derived rainfalls in most cases and the SVM-based SMFM can give better performances than RF-based SMFM. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.