Time Series Forecasting for Outdoor Temperature using Nonlinear Autoregressive Neural Network Models

Weather forecasting is a challenging time series forecasting problem because of its dynamic, continuous, data-intensive, chaotic and irregular behavior. At present, enormous time series forecasting techniques exist and are widely adapted. However, competitive research is still going on to improve the methods and techniques for accurate forecasting. This research article presents the time series forecasting of the metrological parameter, i.e., temperature with NARX (Nonlinear Autoregressive with eXogenous input) based ANN (Artificial Neural Network). In this research work, several time series dependent Recurrent NARX-ANN models are developed and trained with dynamic parameter settings to find the optimum network model according to its desired forecasting task. Network performance is analyzed on the basis of its Mean Square Error (MSE) value over training, validation and test data sets. In order to perform the forecasting for next 4,8 and 12 steps horizon, the model with less MSE is chosen to be the most accurate temperature forecaster. Unlike one step ahead prediction, multi-step ahead forecasting is more difficult and challenging problem to solve due to its underlying additional complexity. Thus, the empirical findings in this work provide valuable suggestions for the parameter settings of NARX model specifically the selection of hidden layer size and autoregressive lag terms in accordance with an appropriate multi-step ahead time series forecasting

A Hybrid Approach for Time Series Forecasting Using Deep Learning and Nonlinear Autoregressive Neural Networks

During recent decades, several studies have been conducted in the field of weather forecasting providing various promising forecasting models. Nevertheless, the accuracy of the predictions still remains a challenge. In this paper a new forecasting approach is proposed: it implements a deep neural network based on a powerful feature extraction. The model is capable of deducing the irregular structure, non-linear trends and significant representations as features learnt from the data. It is a 6-layered deep architecture with 4 hidden units of Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM). The extracts from the last hidden layer are pre-processed, to support the accuracy achieved by the forecaster. The forecaster is a 2-layer ANN model with 35 hidden units for predicting the future intervals. It captures the correlations and regression patterns of the current sample related to the previous terms by using the learnt deep-hierarchal representations of data as an input to the forecaster

In Field Application of an Innovative Sensor for Monitoring Road and Runway Surfaces

Water and ice detection over road and runway surfaces is important to improve traffic safety and to reduce maintenance costs. An innovative low cost capacitive sensor was endowed with an algorithm based on the time derivative of the measured capacitance to indicate the transitions between dry, wet, or icy state of road and runway surfaces. The sensor was investigated theoretically and validated with experiments on field

Conserving energy through neural prediction of sensed data

The constraint of energy consumption is a serious problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this regard, many solutions for this problem have been proposed in recent years. In one line of research, scholars suggest data driven approaches to help conserve energy by reducing the amount of required communication in the network. This paper is an attempt in this area and proposes that sensors be powered on intermittently. A neural network will then simulate sensors’ data during their idle periods. The success of this method relies heavily on a high correlation between the points mak- ing a time series of sensed data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the idea, we conduct a number of experiments. In doing so, we train a NAR network against various datasets of sensed humidity and temperature in different environments. By testing on actual data, it is shown that the predictions by the device greatly obviate the need for sensed data during sensors’ idle periods and save over 65 percent of energ