A dynamic nonstationary spatio-temporal model for short term prediction of precipitation

Precipitation is a complex physical process that varies in space and time. Predictions and interpolations at unobserved times and/or locations help to solve important problems in many areas. In this paper, we present a hierarchical Bayesian model for spatio-temporal data and apply it to obtain short term predictions of rainfall. The model incorporates physical knowledge about the underlying processes that determine rainfall, such as advection, diffusion and convection. It is based on a temporal autoregressive convolution with spatially colored and temporally white innovations. By linking the advection parameter of the convolution kernel to an external wind vector, the model is temporally nonstationary. Further, it allows for nonseparable and anisotropic covariance structures. With the help of the Voronoi tessellation, we construct a natural parametrization, that is, space as well as time resolution consistent, for data lying on irregular grid points. In the application, the statistical model combines forecasts of three other meteorological variables obtained from a numerical weather prediction model with past precipitation observations. The model is then used to predict three-hourly precipitation over 24 hours. It performs better than a separable, stationary and isotropic version, and it performs comparably to a deterministic numerical weather prediction model for precipitation and has the advantage that it quantifies prediction uncertainty.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS564 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Clustering: Methodology, hybrid systems, visualization, validation and implementation

Unsupervised learning is one of the most important steps of machine learning applications. Besides its ability to obtain the insight of the data distribution, unsupervised learning is used as a preprocessing step for other machine learning algorithm. This dissertation investigates the application of unsupervised learning into various types of data for many machine learning tasks such as clustering, regression and classification. The dissertation is organized into three papers. In the first paper, unsupervised learning is applied to mixed categorical and numerical feature data type to transform the data objects from the mixed type feature domain into a new sparser numerical domain. By making use of the data fusion capacity of adaptive resonance theory clustering, the approach is able to reduce the distinction between the numerical and categorical features. The second paper presents a novel method to improve the performance of wind forecast by clustering the time series of the surrounding wind mills into the similar group by using hidden Markov model clustering and using the clustering information to enhance the forecast. A fast forecast method is also introduced by using extreme learning machine which can be trained by analytic form to choose the optimal value of past samples for prediction and appropriate size of the neural network. In the third paper, unsupervised learning is used to automatically learn the feature from the dataset itself without human design of sophisticated feature extractors. The paper points out that by using unsupervised feature learning with multi-quadric radial basis function extreme learning machine the performance of the classifier is better than several other supervised learning methods. The paper further improves the speed of training the neural network by presenting an algorithm that runs parallel on GPU --Abstract, page iv

Wind speed modeled as an indexed semi-Markov process

The increasing interest in renewable energy, particularly in wind, has given rise to the necessity of accurate models for the generation of good synthetic wind speed data. Markov chains are often used with this purpose but better models are needed to reproduce the statistical properties of wind speed data. In a previous paper we showed that semi-Markov processes are more appropriate for this purpose but to reach an accurate reproduction of real data features high order model should be used. In this work we introduce an indexed semi-Markov process that is able to fit real data. We downloaded a database, freely available from the web, in which are included wind speed data taken from L.S.I. -Lastem station (Italy) and sampled every 10 minutes. We then generate synthetic time series for wind speed by means of Monte Carlo simulations. The time lagged autocorrelation is then used to compare statistical properties of the proposed model with those of real data and also with a synthetic time series generated though a simple semi-Markov process.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1109.425

Modeling wind speed with a long-term horizon and high-time interval with a hybrid fourier-neural network model

The limited availability of local climatological stations and the limitations to predict the wind speed (WS) accurately are significant barriers to the expansion of wind energy (WE) projects worldwide. A methodology to forecast accurately the WS at the local scale can be used to overcome these barriers. This study proposes a methodology to forecast the WS with high-resolution and long-term horizons, which combines a Fourier model and a nonlinear autoregressive network (NAR). Given the nonlinearities of the WS variations, a NAR model is used to forecast the WS based on the variability identified with the Fourier analysis. The NAR modelled successfully 1.7 years of windspeed with 3 hours of the time interval, what may be considered the longest forecasting horizon with high resolution at the moment