GRD Journals- Global Research and Development Journal for Engineering | Volume 4 | Issue 10 | September 2019

ISSN: 2455-5703

Statistical Model and Neural Networks based

Weather Forecasting
A. Velayudham M. S. Krishna Priya
Department of Computer Science and Engineering Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Jansons Institute of Technology Jansons Institute of Technology

Abstract
Weather conditions change endlessly and it is very essential for people to know these changes and predict the weather in order to
decide there day to day task. A person may confuse prediction with the forecast, the main difference is forecast is statistical and
scientific and free from intuitions whereas prediction is subjective in nature. Traditionally atmosphere is modeled as fluid. And
future weather is predicted using fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, but since machine learning techniques are more robust to
perturbations, so in this paper we have decided to explore its application to weather forecasting to generate more accurate result.
This paper discusses various methods used in deep neural networks and statistical models to find the most appropriate method for
forecasting weather based on a very minimalistic weather related data set to reduce data collection overheads. It also outlines an
IOT based pipeline to collect data in real time to update existing models and forecast accordingly.
Keywords- Deep Neural Networks, Statistical Models, Minimalistic Weather Data, IoT, Pipeline, Weather Forecasting,
Prediction, Atmosphere

I. INTRODUCTION
Weather forecasting can be defined as the process of predicting the state of atmosphere at a particular time in future for a specified
location. Traditionally we used to model the atmosphere as fluid. And future weather is predicted using fluid dynamics and
thermodynamics, but the problem is weather depends on various factors and these traditional models are not robust enough to
perturbations and are hence less accurate and are unable to make predictions of a long period.
Machine learning techniques changed this process completely and made more accurate reliable predictions as they are
more robust to perturbations. Initially major weather forecasting agencies were using machine learning as their primary analytics
tool but were unable to predict weather over a long time period. A more suitable approach towards such data’s analysis came with
the rise of deep neural networks which is being used at a very high scale these days.
The paper discusses and evaluates various prominently used machine learning and deep learning models e.g. ridge
regression model, Support Vector Regression, ARIMA time series model, Holt Winters model and LSTM Recurrent Neural
Network model to predict the average temperature, based on a very minimalistic data set comprising of maximum temperature and
minimum temperature of previous day. The historical weather data was collected for New Delhi from National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. The input to these models was the historical weather data of last 3 years of average temperature,
maximum temperature and minimum temperature, and the output was the prediction of average temperature of next 1 year.

II. METHODOLOGY

A. Linear Regression Model

Linear regression is a linear approach to model the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more than one independent
variables. Linear regression models uses the least squares approach for fitting purpose but when the problem has substantial
uncertainties in the independent variable (the x variable), then linear regression and least-squares methods have problems. The
linear regression model is in the form –

Where x0 is min temp and x1 is max temperature.

To speed up the calculation we can use Ordinary least squares using following equation –

Here X is 2xN matrix having each column as features min temp and max temp.
For unbiased result an estimator is used whereas,

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B. Ridge Regression Model

Ridge regression is most commonly used method of regularization of ill-posed problems (If no independent variable satisfy the
equation or more than one independent variable does that is, the solution is not unique).
For giving weightage to the desired attributes a regularization term can be used in form of Tikhonov Regularization –

It is same as Linear regression but with a Tikhonov Matrix as. If alpha is the regularization parameter we can choose Tikhonov
Matrix as a scalar multiplication with a 2I identity matrix as –

We used 1 year data of average temperature to train our model and predicted the average temperature of next 1 year and compared
it with the test data. This comparison is shown below in graph.

Fig. 1: Forecasted vs. Actual Data

Table 1: Model Details

Location MUMBAI, IN
Model Ridge Regression
Data Average Temperature
Training Data period 1 August 2017- 31 July 2018
Testing Data period 1 August 2018- 31 July 2019
As from the above graph, the accuracy of the model was 88.84%, but there was a problem with this model as soon as we provided
data of past 10 years our model was unable to predict and accuracy dropped to a vast extent. So we used another model. That is
ARIMA model.

C. ARIMA Model
In Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average model data is fitted to time series format to better understand the data and to predict
future points in the series. Generally ARIMA models are applied in cases where data show evidence of non-stationary, where an
initial differencing step can be applied one or more times to eliminate the non-stationarity. Here:
Auto Regressive (AR) indicates that the evolving variables (feature: average temperature) of our interest is regressed on its own
prior values.
Integrated (I) indicates that the data values have been replaced with the difference between their values and the previous values.
Moving Average (MA) indicates that the regression error is actually a linear combination of error terms whose values occurred
contemporaneously and at various times in the past.
ARIMA model is generally denoted ARIMA (p,d,q) where parameters p,d, and q are non-negative integers.
‘p’ is the order (number of time lags) of the autoregressive model.
‘d’ is the degree of differencing (the number of times the differencing is done).
‘q’ is the order of the moving-average model.
If we consider θ1 and Θ1 parameterization terms then the corresponding equation for the ARIMA 2,0,1 can be written as following
ϕ0(B)(1−B)2Φ0(B12)(1−B12)0Yt=θ1(B)Θ1(B12)et
ϕ0(B)=Φ0(B12)=1, θ1(B)=1+θ1B
Θ1(B12)=1+Θ1B12
And the result is
Yt−2Yt−1+Yt−2=et+Θ1et−12+θ1et−1+θ1Θ1et−13

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 Statistical Model and Neural Networks based Weather Forecasting
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We used past 6 years data of average temperature to train our model and predicted the average temperature of next 1 year and
compared it with the test data. As seen in graph.

Fig. 2: Data Log Difference

Fig. 3: Forecast vs. Actual Data

Table 2: Model Details

Location MUMBAI, IN
Model ARIMA
Data Average Temperature
Training Data period 1 August 2011- 31 July 2018
Testing Data period 1 August 2018- 31 July 2019
As of the above graph, the accuracy of our model was 82.19%, but accuracy is not enough. So we used another model. That is
LSTM model.

D. Holts Winters Model

Holt-winter is used for exponential smoothing to make short term forecasts by using multiplicative models with increasing or
decreasing trend and seasonality. Smoothing is measured by beta and gamma parameters in holt’s model.
If the beta parameter is set FALSE, the function performs exponential smoothing.
The gamma parameter is used for the seasonal component. If the gamma parameter is set to FALSE, a non-seasonal model is fitted.

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 Statistical Model and Neural Networks based Weather Forecasting
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E. LSTM Neural Networks Model

When we consider weather data a person may think that the current weather condition depends only on data of past one week
instead of data of past few years but it is false sometimes older data helps the system to recognize trends that recent data is not able
to show. So a problem of Long-Term Dependencies arises to which the general RNNs are not robust.
Thus LSTMs are used, these type of RNNs are capable of dealing with Long-term Dependencies. LSTM remembers the
information for the longer period and has a total control over its value and can change its information any time.
The working of LSTM in the context of our dataset can be represented with following equations –

Here xt are our features for tth iteration and yt-1 is the corresponding actual average temperature in the previous iteration.
bi ,bf and bo are corresponding biase used for input, forget and output gate. C t is the corresponding cost for tth iteration. And Wx is
the weight used in xth layer.
The final output is in form of 1x365x1 matrix for next year.
We used past years data of average temperature, minimum temperature and maximum temperature to train our model and
predicted the average temperature, minimum temperature and maximum temperature of next year and compared it with the test
data. As seen in graph below.

Fig. 4: Weather data (Average Temperature) 2011-2018

Table 3: Model Details

Location MUMBAI, IN
Model LSTM
Average Temperature
Data Minimum Temperature
Maximum Temperature
Training Data period 1 August 2011- 31 July 2018
Testing Data period 1 July 2018 - 31 July 2018

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 Statistical Model and Neural Networks based Weather Forecasting
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Fig. 5: Error reduces as the program iterates

As of the above graph, the accuracy of our model was 96.03%.

F. IoT based Pipeline to Continuously Predict Temperature

1) Arduino, Temperature Sensor

Arduino are small micro-controllers which are available in a form of DIY (do it yourself) kits which can be placed at some open
ground or a park and temperature sensor is connected to it which collects the data of temperature on daily basis and provide it to
the Arduino.

2) Flask server
The data from Arduino is then send to our server which stores the data captured by the sensors and also consist of our trained
model.

3) Pre-trained LSTM model on Flask server

The server will consist of a pre trained LSTM model which is trained using past 4-5 years data and is designed to forecast future
temperature on the basis of previous data.

4) Data collection using Arduino

The Arduino works for whole day continuously and collects the data which is transmitted to server at some point in a day.

5) Data Processing
The data that is transmitted to the server is processed at a certain time to find minimum and maximum temperature of that day and
average temperature of that today.

6) Server contains last day's data

Our server already contains the data of the previous day and now the data that is collected on present day is integrated to it and
used for prediction of next day data.

7) Model retraining
Our model is now trained with yesterday's temperature and today's actual temperature which make next day prediction more
accurate and a system which performs online training is being developed.

8) Model’s Prediction
Now after retraining our model forecasts today's temperature and returns its values to the dashboard and stored into the server
which can be used for prediction of next day.

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III. CONCLUSION
Below is the comparative study of all three models that are used in this paper:
Table 5: Comparison Details
Accuracy
No Model Features Training Span Testing Span Flaws
(%)
Ridge 1 August 2017- 31 1 August 2018- 31
1 Avg. Temp 88.84 Overfitting occurs in this model.
Regression July 2018 July 2019
Time Series Avg. 1 August 2011- 31 1 August 2018- 31 Model is inefficient for this kind of
2 82.19
ARIMA Temp. July 2018 July 2019 data.
Max.
Temp, 1 August 2011- 31 1 July 2018 - 31 July Accuracy varies as and when training
3 LSTM 96.03
Min. July 2018 2018 data changes.
Temp.
Based on the table of results above we can conclude that amongst various models of machine learning that can be used to predict
weather LSTM is best suitable for this purpose. Amongst these models the ridge regression model is mostly used for regularization
of ill-posed problems so it is good for forecasting problems and thus showed a very high accuracy but there is problem of over
fitting which is not good for our kind of application data set. So we used Time Series ARIMA model, in ARIMA model data is
fitted to time series format to better understand the data and to predict future points in the series.
As now as our data set comprises of temperature of different dates so it can be well represented using the time series
model which work quite close to real world environment, but the problem with this model was that it showed a very less accuracy.
In order to increase the accuracy and give more weightage to recent information we used LSTM neural network model, these type
of RNNs are capable of dealing with long-term Dependencies. LSTM remembers the information for the longer period and has a
total control over its value and can change its information any time, which is well suited for our kind of data set and out of all
models we have used for our paper LSTM model outperformed all of them and showed the best accuracy.

REFERENCES
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