Rainfall Prediction Using Machine Learning Algorithms for the Various Ecological Zones of Ghana

Abstract

Accurate rainfall prediction has become very complicated in recent times due to climate change and variability. The efficiency of classification algorithms in rainfall prediction has flourished. The study contributes to using various classification algorithms for rainfall prediction in the different ecological zones of Ghana. The classification algorithms include Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) and K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN). The dataset, consisting of various climatic attributes, was sourced from the Ghana Meteorological Agency spanning 1980 – 2019. The performance of the classification algorithms was examined based on precision, recall, f1-score, accuracy and execution time with various training and testing data ratios. On all three training and testing ratios: 70:30, 80:20 and 90:10, RF, XGB and MLP performed well, whereas KNN performed least across all zones. In terms of the execution time of the models, Decision Tree is consistently portrayed as the fastest, whereas MLP used the most run time.

Keywords

• Rainfall prediction
• classification algorithms
• ecological zones
• rain/no-rain class