Data-driven multi-time-step ahead daily rainfall forecasting using singular spectrum analysis-based data pre-processing

Accurate forecasting of rainfall, especially daily time-step rainfall, remains a challenging task for hydrologists' invariance with the existence of several deterministic, stochastic and data-driven models. Several researchers have fine-tuned the hydrological models by using pre-processed input data but improvement rate in prediction of daily time-step rainfall data is not up to the expected level. There are still chances to improve the accuracy of rainfall predictions with an efficient data preprocessing algorithm. Singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is one such technique found to be a very successful data pre-processing algorithm. In the past, the artificial neural network (ANN) model emerged as one of the most successful data-driven techniques in hydrology because of its ability to capture non-linearity and a wide variety of algorithms. This study aims at assessing the advantage of using SSA as a pre-processing algorithm in ANN models. It also compares the performance of a simple ANN model with SSA-ANN model in forecasting single time-step as well as multi-time-step (3-day and 7-day) ahead daily rainfall time series pertaining to Koyna watershed, India. The model performance measures show that data pre-processing using SSA has enhanced the performance of ANN models both in single as well as multi-time-step ahead daily rainfall prediction.