Development of Precipitation Forecast Model Based on

Artificial Intelligence and Subseasonal Clustering

Laleh Parviz 1 and Kabir Rasouli 2

Abstract: Forecasting precipitation remains challenging because of its large spatial and temporal variability, and the uncertainty in pre-
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cipitation forecast leads to an important source of uncertainty in the prediction of other components of a hydrological system. In this study, in
order to forecast subseasonal precipitation and better characterize the temporal variability of precipitation, a hybrid precipitation forecast
model was developed based on (1) temporal clustering of subseasonal precipitation; and (2) coupling an improved seasonal autoregressive
integrated moving average (ISARIMA) model to an artificial neural network (ANN) model to take the advantages of both models and capture
precipitation persistence and statistics in each cluster. The performance of the proposed model was compared against different variations of
conventional statistical models in the Rasht station with a humid climate and Gorgan station with a Mediterranean climate, both located
south of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran. The model evaluation criteria indicated that the hybrid model can remarkably improve forecast
accuracy. The root-mean square error score of the forecasted precipitation by the hybrid model against observations decreased 48% and 24%
in the Rasht and Gorgan stations, respectively, when compared with the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA)
model and the index of agreement increased 32% and 17%, respectively, when compared with the ANN models. The proposed hybrid model
can be a useful tool for forecasting subseasonal precipitation in humid and arid climates with persistent and nonpersistent precipitation
patterns. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)HE.1943-5584.0001862. © 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
Author keywords: Subseasonal precipitation; Forecast; Hybrid model; Artificial neural network (ANN); Clustering analysis.

Introduction evapotranspiration, surface and subsurface runoff, and groundwater

Accurate precipitation forecasts, especially in subseasonal time
scales, are essential for short-term planning of agricultural activities
and efficient water resources management. There are currently
three main forecasting approaches: dynamical (knowledge-driven,
e.g., Michalakes 1999), statistical (data-driven, e.g., Valipour et al.
2013), and combination of statistical and dynamical approaches
(e.g., Carter et al. 1989; Hamill and Whitaker 2006; Slater et al.
2017; Sarkodie and Strezov 2018). In the third category, also
known as model output statistics technique (Glahn and Lowry
1972), first, dynamical model forecasts are archived and then a
statistical linear or nonlinear model is applied to determine the re-
lationship between numerical model outputs and weather variables,
e.g., precipitation. However, these models still show large forecast
biases in precipitation estimation (Cannon et al. 2015) compared to
local observations. Therefore, a skillful precipitation forecast still
remains a challenging task due to its high spatial and temporal vari-
ability and nonlinear and nonstationary characteristics (Sarhadi
et al. 2016). Improvement in precipitation estimations is needed,
especially in arid and semiarid regions where slight changes in pre-
cipitation can markedly change runoff mechanisms (Fekete et al.
2004). With uncertainties in precipitation forecast, estimation of
all other components of a hydrological cycle, including infiltration,
1
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Agriculture, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani
Univ., Tabriz 53714-161, Iran. Email: laleh_parviz@yahoo.com
2
Research Physical Scientist, Dept. of Geoscience, Univ. of Calgary,
2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4 (corresponding
author). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8176-2132. Email: kabir
.rasouli@ucalgary.ca
Note. This manuscript was submitted on April 22, 2018; approved on
August 5, 2019; published online on September 28, 2019. Discussion
period open until February 28, 2020; separate discussions must be sub-
mitted for individual papers. This paper is part of the Journal of Hydro-
logic Engineering, © ASCE, ISSN 1084-0699.
recharge, remains uncertain (Fekete et al. 2004). Extensive data
collection is usually required for a knowledge-driven modeling
experiment to represent governing atmospheric and near-surface
hydrologic processes. Data collection through field experiments
is expensive and challenging, particularly in remote areas. Simplic-
ity and application of the data-driven modeling approaches in
different geographical regions make these tools desirable for
meteorological and hydrological forecasts (Ouyang et al. 2016).
The data-driven modeling methods such as autoregressive
integrated moving average (ARIMA) (Ouyang et al. 2016) and ma-
chine learning approaches such as artificial neural network (ANN)
(Moustris et al. 2011; Tealab et al. 2017) were widely used in Earth
sciences. The ARIMA models, which are based on the best fit to the
historical values of hydrometeorological time series, were first pro-
posed by Box and Jenkins (1976). These models were implemented
to analyze short-term and long-term variation of fluctuations in the
atmospheric and hydrologic time series (Sun and Koch 2001). For
instance, Dabral and Murry (2017) used a seasonal ARIMA called
SARIMA to forecast monthly, weekly, and daily monsoon rainfalls
in humid regions of India. Statistical model assessment measures
showed a reasonably acceptable performance of the SARIMA
models in the literature (Eni and Adeyeye 2015; Chang et al. 2012).
Osarumwense (2013) used the Box-Jenkins SARIMA model for
rainfall forecast in Nigeria. Narasimha Murthy et al. (2018) inves-
tigated rainfall patterns using SARIMA in northeastern India.
The ANN models, with emulating the structure of human neural
systems, were introduced by McCulloch and Pitts (1943). The
back-propagation neural network models were used in different ap-
plications. For instance, these models were used for subseasonal
rainfall forecast in Indonesia by Mislan et al. (2015). They devel-
oped the back-propagation ANN methods with different optimiza-
tion techniques to improve precipitation estimations by optimizing
the structure and training period, which may affect the accuracy of

© ASCE 04019053-1 J. Hydrol. Eng.

J. Hydrol. Eng., 2019, 24(12): 04019053

 subseasonal and seasonal forecasts. Moustris et al. (2011) used the
preceding 4 months precipitation and Sulaiman and Wahab (2018)
used the preceding 1–6 months precipitation to forecast monthly
precipitation. Marzano et al. (2006) compared the accuracy of pre-
cipitation intensity estimated by ANN with previously developed
regression methods. In comparison to the regression approaches,
ANN provides more skillful forecasts. Karamouz et al. (2009) devel-
oped a hybrid drought index using a probabilistic ANN to forecast
drought on a monthly time scale. Diagnosing the performance of
the SARIMA and ANN models over the last decades and in different
scientific fields has resulted in the improvements of these models
through (1) combining them and taking the advantages of these
two models (Pannakkong et al. 2016; Zhang 2003), and (2) overcom-
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ing the weakness of each model by preprocessing the training data
(Wang et al. 2014). Wang et al. (2014) improved the accuracy of
monthly precipitation forecast using an improved version of SAR-
IMA model, called ISARIMA. However, the application of linear re-
gression in this model for capturing nonlinear features of precipitation
can lead to uncertainties in precipitation forecasts. Both linearity and
nonlinearity of time series are required to be considered in precipi-
tation forecasts (Chen and Wang 2007; Tosun et al. 2016). Satisfac-
tory results of the linear models are possible when the linear
component of the time series is dominant to the nonlinear component.
Also, with a highly nonlinear component of the time series, nonlinear
models can substantially improve the forecast skill (Yolcu et al.
2013). It is well established in the literature that ANN can signifi-
cantly outperform linear regression models in environmental model-
ing (Zhang 2003; Chen and Wang 2007; Zeynoddin et al. 2018).
One of the advantages of the data-driven models is their ability
to capture temporal variability, especially seasonal and subseasonal
variations needed for better estimation of temporal variability in
hydrological processes and better managing water resources
(Dabral and Murry 2017; Jiang et al. 2010). Modeling temporal
variability should be carried out with care to avoid losing inter-
monthly variations (Wang et al. 2014). In the conventional
SARIMA model structure intermonthly variations are usually ne-
glected, which can affect the simulation performance. Capturing
both interannual and intermonthly variations in the hydrological
45° E 50° E
40° N
Caspian Sea
35° N
30° N
Study area
Sea
Province border
25° N 0 350 700 km
45° E 50° E
Fig. 1. Location of weather stations south of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran. The Rasht station is located in the Gilan Province and the Gorgan
station is located in the Golestan Province.
© ASCE
J. Hydrol. Eng., 2019, 24(12): 04019053
modeling can substantially improve the forecasting skill (Wang
et al. 2014). In coupling data-driven models, either temporal vari-
ability with different time scales (e.g., annual and monthly) are
captured, or two separate linear and nonlinear signals of the given
phenomenon are captured (Zeynoddin et al. 2018). For instance,
ARIMA is used to capture the linear signals while ANN is widely
used to capture the nonlinear signals (e.g., Chen and Wang 2007;
Ozozen et al. 2016; Lee et al. 2018). Moeeni and Bonakdari (2017)
coupled SARIMA to ANN, and Moeeni et al. (2017) coupled
SARIMA to a neuro-fuzzy model to forecast monthly streamflow.
In contrast to other hybrid models in the literature, both temporal
variability and two types of linear and nonlinear signals can be
captured by the proposed hybrid model in this study to further im-
prove the precipitation estimations. To overcome the limitation of
ISARIMA model, the ANN model, instead of a regression model,
was used in this paper to capture the nonlinear relationships between
main statistics of monthly precipitation clusters and associated
precipitation intensities. Therefore, a hybrid model is developed
in this study by integrating ISARMIA and ANN models to estimate
monthly precipitation in the future. Therefore, the objectives of this
study are to cluster the temporal patterns of precipitation, improve
monthly estimations of precipitation in two weather stations south of
the Caspian Sea, and evaluate the forecast performance of the pro-
posed hybrid method against SARIMA, ANN, and their improved
versions. This paper is organized as follows. First, the study area is
introduced and the proposed hybrid model is developed. Next, pre-
cipitation forecasts by data-driven models are compared with the
forecasts of the hybrid model and performance of the models is
evaluated based on assessment measures. Finally, discussions of
the findings and conclusions of this paper are described.
Methodology
Study Site Description
The precipitation time series in the Rasht weather station in Gilan
Province, and the Gorgan weather station in Golestan Province in
55° E 60° E
40° N
35° N
30° N
Persian Gulf
Gulf of Oman 25° N
55° E 60° E
04019053-2 J. Hydrol. Eng.
 Iran (Fig. 1) were used to investigate the performance of the devel-
oped hybrid model in forecasting monthly precipitation. These
two stations are located within the Khazar Basin, which is one
of the five main river basins in the Iranian Plateau. The climate
of Rasht and Gorgan stations were determined as wet and humid,
respectively, according to the precipitation effectiveness index
(Thornthwaite 1948). The Koppen (1936) climate classification
subtype is “Cfa” (i.e., humid subtropical climate) in the Rasht sta-
tion and “Csa” (hot summer Mediterranean climate) in the Gorgan
station. Changes in seasonal precipitation are expected under the
effect of climate change in this area (Coles et al. 2017).
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ARIMA Model
The conventional ARIMA models were formulated with a linear
function of times series in the past and random shocks (Jiang
et al. 2010). The general notation of ARIMA is described as
ARIMAðp; d; qÞ, where p, d, and q explain orders of autoregres-
sive, differencing, and moving average parameters, respectively
(Narasimha Murthy et al. 2018). The ARIMA models were recently
modified to account for the seasonal variability. The seasonal
ARIMAs are called SARIMAðp; d; qÞ × ðP; D; QÞs , in which
(P; D; QÞs represents the seasonal variations. The mathematical
form of a multiplicative seasonal model can be written as the
following equation (Jiang et al. 2010):
φp ðBÞΦP ðBs Þð1 − BÞd ð1 − Bs ÞD Zt ¼ θq ðBÞΘQ ðBs Þεt
with
φp ðBÞ ¼ 1 − φ1 B − : : : − φp Bp
θq ðBÞ ¼ 1 − θ1 B − : : : − θq Bq
ΦP ðBs Þ ¼ 1 − Φs Bs − : : : − ΦPs BPs
ΘQ ðBs Þ ¼ 1 − Θs Bs − : : : − ΘQs BQs ð1Þ
where p = autoregressive order; d = number of differencing
operations; q = moving average order; P = order of seasonal au-
toregressive; D = number of seasonal differencing; Q = order of
seasonal moving average; s = season length; B = backward (time
difference) operator; ε = Gaussian white-noise term; t = operator
for representation of time; φ = autoregressive parameter; θ = mov-
ing average parameter; Φ = seasonal autoregressive parameter; and
Θ = seasonal moving average parameter (Chen and Wang 2007).
The proposed ARIMA model by Box and Jenkins (1976) includes
three steps, namely (1) identifying the structure of model, (2) esti-
mation of the model parameters, and (3) performing goodness-of-
fit tests on the forecasted time series (Chen and Wang 2007).
ANN Model
ANN can be used to establish a relationship between predictors
(inputs) and predictands (outputs) without previous assumptions.
The structure of an ANN model is characterized by three input,
hidden, and output layers; the number of neurons in the hidden
layer; and type of transfer functions relating model inputs to the
hidden layer, and the hidden layer to the output layer (Pannakkong
et al. 2016). Eq. (2) shows the relationship between ANN input and
output variables:

XR
X Q 
z t ¼ bh þ f wh g bi;h þ w i ; h pi ð2Þ
h¼1 i¼1
where zt = simulated model output at time t; wi;h and wh =
connection weights of the layers; Q and R = number of neu-
rons in the input and hidden layers; bi;h and bh = biases; f and
© ASCE 04019053-3
J. Hydrol. Eng., 2019, 24(12): 04019053
g = transfer functions; and Pi = ith input to the neuron (Pannakkong
et al. 2016).
ISARIMA Model with Clustering Analysis
The SARIMA model can be applied to time series with seasonal
patterns with a subseasonal time step, e.g., week or month. The
SARIMA model accounts for the interannual variation of monthly
time series and does not include intermonthly variations. There-
fore, ISARIMA was proposed to improve the conventional
SARIMA models by incorporating both interannual and inter-
monthly variations in environmental fluxes (Wang et al. 2014).
The modeling procedure of ISARIMA includes clustering analysis
in which monthly time series are classified into clusters with sim-
ilar statistics (Wang and Yao 2018). There are several partitioning
clustering algorithms such as the k-means (Lioyd 1982), subtrac-
tive and hierarchical clustering (Jain and Dubes 1998), and some
soft computing ones such as fuzzy c-means (Bezdek 1981) and
self-organizing neural network (Kohonene 1989; Sfetsos and
Siriopoulos 2004). The hierarchical cluster analysis is the most
commonly used method (Tamilselvi et al. 2015), which uses an
algorithm to produce a dendrogram that assembles variables or
objects into a signal tree, allowing users to visualize the similar-
ities of the samples. This method is usually used to evaluate intra-
group and intergroup similarities and contrasts (Caesar et al.
2018). A hierarchical clustering method introduced by Ward
(1963) is used in this study to create groups with minimum vari-
ance (Eszergár-Kiss and Caesar 2017). This method is based on
the error sum of squares in identifying and merging clusters
(Zhang et al. 2018). The Ward method is complex but performs
reasonably well. The basis of the method is to calculate the
distance of the clusters from the grand average of the sample
(Belgaman et al. 2017). In comparison to other methods, the Ward
method performs better in hierarchical clustering, especially in
climatological studies, as it minimizes the variance between the
elements within a cluster (Blashfield 1976; Hands and Everitt
1987; Eszergár-Kiss and Caesar 2017; Farrelly et al. 2017). There-
fore, the Ward method is selected for clustering in this study. After
clustering analysis, 12 linear regressions (LR) for 12 months are
established. For a given month, the LR model is trained based on
the main statistics of the cluster of that month and precipitation
values.
Proposed Hybrid Model
After identifying the clusters by the Ward method, the main statis-
tics of each cluster such as maximum, minimum, and truncated
mean are calculated that provide more information about time
series. The statistics of clusters summarize the main signals in pre-
cipitation distribution and can be forecasted better than individual
precipitation events by ANN models in the hybrid method with
cluster statistics as input and monthly precipitation values as out-
put. Therefore, 12 ANN models with the capacity to capture non-
linear characteristics of precipitation instead of 12 LR models with
linear characteristics are trained for 12 months. For a given month,
the ANN model is trained by main statistics of the cluster of that
month and precipitation values in that month. For example, if the
three months of January, February, and November are clustered into
Cluster 1, and two months of March and April are clustered into
Cluster 2, then five ANNs for 5 months linking the main statistics
of two clusters to a monthly time series are established. The next
step is to train the ISARIMA model for each cluster and to predict
the statistics of the clusters in the validation period. In the final step,
the forecasted main statistics are applied to the ANNs discussed
J. Hydrol. Eng.
 Observed monthly precipitation

ANN SARIMA ISARIMA Hybrid model

(1) Train ANN, with

0.0 1.0 2.0 3.0

0.0 1.0 2.0 3.0
(1) Model
optimal neurons & identification
activation function;
inputs: antecedent
precipitation; outputs:
(2) Parameter
precipitation
estimation cluster 1 … cluster m cluster 1 … cluster m
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(1) Obtain cluster statistics (1) Obtain cluster statistics

(2) Test ANN; inputs: (3) Diagnostic
antecedent checking
precipitation
(2) Train linear regression (2) Train ANN for each month;
(LR) for each month; inputs: inputs: cluster statistics;
cluster statistics; outputs: outputs: precipitation values
precipitation values

(3) Forecast cluster statistics (3) Forecast cluster statistics by

by ARIMA ISARIMA

(4) Test LR for each month; (4) Test ANN for each month;
inputs: cluster statistics inputs: cluster statistics

Model output: forecasted precipitation for next 36 months

Fig. 2. Comparison of the four statistical precipitation forecast models used in this study. The hybrid ISARIMA-ANN model is developed based on
the identified precipitation clusters and coupled ISARIMA and ANN models.

earlier and monthly precipitation values are estimated. In summary, where Pct;A = forecasted precipitation for month t within cluster
the steps of the hybrid model development are as follows: c over the assessment period (A); and f is the ANN model as in
• Step 1 involves establishing a relationship between cluster Step 1. The basic structure of the hybrid model can be summar-
statistics and precipitation values using ANN over the training ized as follows: (1) clustering analysis for grouping monthly
period time series with similar variations, (2) calculation of main
statistics for each cluster, and (3) coupling ANN to ISARIMA
Pct;T ¼ fðScT Þ for capturing nonlinear and linear signals. Fig. 2 shows the
structure of the hybrid model in comparison to the other models.
t ¼ 1; 2; 3; : : : ; 12 S ¼ 1∶min; 2∶max; 3∶mean c ¼ 1; 2; : : : ; m
ð3Þ Measures for Modeling Performance
For evaluating the performance of models, six statistical measures
where Pct;T is monthly precipitation at month t that is classified were used to assess the forecast accuracies, namely the root-mean
by the Ward method into cluster c; ScT are statistics of the cluster square error (RMSE), relative root-mean square error (RRMSE),
c in the training period (T); m = total number of clusters; and mean absolute error (MAE), mean relative error (MRE), mean
f is the ANN model as in Eq. (2). square error (MSE), and agreement index (AI), which are defined
• Step 2 involves estimating statistics for each cluster over the as follows:
assessment period
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u N
1u X
ScA ¼ gðPct Þ ð4Þ RMSE ¼ t ðO − Pi Þ2 ð6Þ
N i¼1 i
where ScA is the estimated statistics of cluster c over the assess-
ment period (A); and g is the ISARIMA model. RMSE
RRMSE ¼ ð7Þ
• Step 3 consists of forecasting precipitation for each month over Ō
the assessment period
1X N
MAE ¼ jP − Oi j ð8Þ
Pct;A ¼ fðScA Þ ð5Þ N i¼1 i

© ASCE 04019053-4 J. Hydrol. Eng.

J. Hydrol. Eng., 2019, 24(12): 04019053

 N  
1X  Pi − Oi 
MRE ¼ ð9Þ
N i¼1  Oi 
PN
ðPi − Oi Þ2
MSE ¼ i¼1
ð10Þ
N cance level, respectively. Because of the periodicity of statistics
PN
ðPi − Oi Þ2
AI ¼ 1 − PN i¼1
2
ð11Þ
i¼1 ðjPi − Ōj þ jOi − ŌjÞ
where Pi = predicted value; Oi = observed value; and Ō = mean
of observed value. A small value of error criteria indicates the prox-
imity of the simulations to observations. Willmott (1981) proposed
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AI to overcome the insensitivity of the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency
and coefficient of determination to differences between observation
and simulation statistics (e.g., mean and variance). The AI score is a
dimensionless measure that ranges between 0 and 1. High values of
AI indicate a good agreement of the observed and simulated values
(Pannakkong et al. 2016; Moustris et al. 2011). In this paper, the
performance of the models is compared during a 3-year validation
period similar to many other studies. We found that that increasing
the validation or forecast period to one-third of the entire observa-
tion period does increase the uncertainty in the precipitation fore-
casts. The length of validation period in the literature varies from
30% to less than 10% of the entire simulation period for the ANN
model (e.g., Huesca et al. 2014; Nascimento Camelo et al. 2018).
The selection of the length of training and validation periods de-
pends on the length of observations recorded and the purpose of the
modeling. For the forecast purpose in this study, we found that the
ANN forecasts are uncertain beyond 3 years. Note that this model
and other models used in this study are trained only with the pre-
cipitation data or statistics of the precipitation data as inputs and not
other atmospheric variables. Furthermore, if the entire simulation
period is split into 70% for training and 30% for forecasting or if the
k-fold validation is used, the ANN model outputs will not be com-
parable to the results of the SARIMA and ISARIMA models,
which are based solely on autoregression and moving average
parameters and their performance degrades as the forecast lead time
increases.
Results
The monthly time series of precipitation in the Rasht and Gorgan
stations for the period of 1976–2013 are used to train the following
models: conventional SARIMA, ANN, ISARIMA based on clus-
tering analysis and regression analysis, improved ANN based on
clustering and regression analysis (IANN), and the proposed hybrid
of ISARIMA and ANN based on clustering analysis (ISARIMA-
ANN). The performance of these models in forecasting precipita-
tion is assessed over the period of 2014–2016.
SARIMA Model
Testing randomness and seasonal autocorrelation of time series
is the first step in developing a statistical model. The precipitation
time series over the training period and autocorrelation functions
(ACFs) are plotted in Fig. 3. The seasonal cycle in time series is
repeated every 12 months as shown with ACF values [Figs. 3(b–f)].
The crossing of ACF spikes outside of the confidence limit
[Figs. 3(b–f)] indicates that the precipitation time series in the
two study stations are not random. The normality test shows that
the time series are not normally distributed. Therefore, time series
must be transformed to a normal distribution and normally distrib-
uted time series are used to develop the models.
© ASCE 04019053-5
J. Hydrol. Eng., 2019, 24(12): 04019053
The seasonal Mann-Kendall test (Mann 1945; Kendall 1975;
Hirsch and Slack 1984) showed a significant decreasing trend in
the Gorgan precipitation but not significant changes in the Rasht
precipitation. The p-value of the detected trends in the Gorgan
and Rasht precipitations are smaller and larger than the 5% signifi-
such as mean and standard deviation, the seasonality is considered
in modeling. Time series with a seasonal cycle and nonstationary
characteristics are more complex. Transformation can remove the
nonstationarity from complex time series and provide stationary
time series. For example, the nonstationarity test of augmented
Dickey-Fuller (ADF) showed the value of 0.086 for monthly time
series of precipitation in the Rasht station, which is slightly larger
than the significance level, α ¼ 0.05, confirming the nonstationar-
ity of the time series. However, after transformation the ADF value
dropped to less than 0.001, indicating that transformed data are
stationary. For selecting the SARIMA model order, a range of 0
to 3 (four cases) is applied to each parameter of the model including
seasonal moving average (SMA), seasonal autoregressive (SAR),
autoregressive (AR), and moving average (MA) (i.e., four param-
eters). From 4 × 4 × 4 × 4 ¼ 256 possible cases, only those that
passed the diagnostic check (normality and white noise of the
model residuals) are selected and those that are not feasible are dis-
carded. In order to identify the best model, the Schwarz-Bayesian
criterion (SBC) is used. The lower the SBC score, the better the
model performance. The best models are SARIMAð3; 0; 2Þ ×
ð1; 1; 2Þ12 , where ARð1Þ ¼ 0.32, ARð2Þ ¼ −0.16, ARð3Þ ¼ −0.08,
SARð12Þ ¼ −0.59, MAð1Þ ¼ 0.3, MAð2Þ ¼ −0.1, SMAð12Þ ¼
0.41, and SMAð12Þ ¼ 0.5 with a SBC score of −2.4 for the Rasht
station; and SARIMAð0; 1; 1Þ × ð1; 1; 2Þ12 where SARð12Þ ¼
−0.66, MAð1Þ ¼ 0.95, SMAð12Þ ¼ 0.28, and SMAð24Þ ¼ 0.59
with a SBC score of 3.4 for the Gorgan station. The Kolmogorov–
Smirnov normality test of model residuals verifies the normality of
the residuals. The significant level of the test is equal to 0.2 for both
time series, which is larger than α ¼ 0.05.
ANN Model
The inputs of the ANN model are determined by calculating the
correlation coefficient between precipitation values at the current
time step, t and four previous time steps, t − 1, t − 2, t − 3, and
t − 4. The maximum correlation coefficient was found between
precipitations at the current time step and that in time step t − 1
and it was 0.33 for the Rasht station and 0.17 for the Gorgan
station. In this study, a back-propagation neural network algorithm
is used. Modeling steps such as selection of the optimal number of
neurons in the hidden layer and types of the activation functions are
necessary to appropriately train the ANN model. The activation
functions that are used in this research include logistic sigmoid,
tangent sigmoid, and pure linear. The performance criteria to obtain
the optimal number of the neurons in the hidden layer are shown in
Fig. 4. The optimal number of neurons in the hidden layer is found
to be 7 and the activation functions of hidden and output layers are
found to perform better with tangent sigmoid and logistic sigmoid
functions.
ISARIMA and IANN
The improved versions of the ANN and SARIMA models are ob-
tained when these models are applied to different clusters with sim-
ilar precipitation patterns instead of a single model for the entire time
series. In fact, the ANN and SARIMA models are not directly ap-
plied to time series, but they are applied to the statistics of each clus-
ter. The Ward clustering method discussed in the “Methodology”
J. Hydrol. Eng.
 600

150
500
Monthly precipitation [mm]”

Monthly precipitation [mm]”

400

100
300
200

50
100
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0
0 100 200 300 400 0 100 200 300 400
(a) Month (1976−2013) (d) Month (1976−2013)
1.0

1.0
0.8

0.8
0.6

0.6
0.4
ACF

ACF
0.4
0.2

0.2
0.0

0.0
−0.2

−0.2

0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25
(b) Lag (Month) (e) Lag (Month)
−0.15 −0.10 −0.05 0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15 0.20
0.3
0.2
Partial ACF

Partial ACF
0.1
0.0
−0.1
−0.2

0 5 10 15 20 25 0 5 10 15 20 25
(c) Lag (Month) (f) Lag (Month)

Fig. 3. Monthly precipitation over the period of 1976–2013 and autocorrelation function (ACF) and partial autocorrelation function (PACF)
values for different lag times for (a–c) Rasht station; and (d–f) Gorgan station. The horizontal lines in ACF and PACF plots represent the 95%
confidence intervals. Not all of the autocorrelation values are within the confidence intervals. This shows that these time series are not random
and have a seasonal cycle.

section is applied to classify the monthly precipitation as shown in dendrogram by the number of vertical lines in the dendrogram
Fig. 5. A dendrogram is a tree diagram that presents the distance cut by a horizontal line that can transverse the maximum distance
and sequence at which the observations are clustered (Belgaman vertically without intersecting a cluster. The cutting point is based
et al. 2017). The number of clusters can be chosen from the on an accrued distance. Based on the clustering analysis and the

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 2
RRMSE MRE 7.5
1.6
Error criteria

7
1.2

Distance - Rasht
6.5
0.8

0.4 6

0 5.5
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
(a) number of neuron
5
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70
(a) Jan Oct May Jun Nov Feb Mar Apr Aug Jul Dec Sep
RMSE
68
Error criteria

66
7.5
64
7

Distance - Gorgan
62
6.5
60
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
(b) number of neuron 6

Fig. 4. Identifying the optimal number of neurons in the hidden layer 5.5
of the ANN model based on assessment measures of (a) RRMSE,
MRE; and (b) RMSE in the Rasht station.
5

(b) Jun Oct Feb Aug Jan Dec Sep Mar Jul May Apr Nov

dendrogram in Fig. 5, four clusters of monthly precipitation for the
Rasht station (Cluster 1 = January, October; Cluster 2 = June,
November, May; Cluster 3 = July, December, September; and
Cluster 4 = February, March, April, August) and three clusters for
the Gorgan station (Cluster 1 = February, June, August, October;
Cluster 2 = January, September, December; and Cluster 3 =
April, March, May, July, November) are obtained. After clustering
monthly precipitation, the statistics of each cluster, including maxi-
mum, minimum and truncated mean, are calculated. Based on clus-
tering analysis, the number of maximum, minimum, and truncated
mean time series is 4, 4, and 4 in the Rash station and it is 3, 3,
and 3 in the Gorgan station. In the next step, 12 LR models are
developed for each station with the main statistics of each cluster
as independent variables (model inputs) and monthly precipitation
of each cluster as dependent variables (model outputs). More spe-
cifically, 4, 3, and 5 LR models for three clusters in the Gorgan
station, and 2, 3, 3, and 4 LR models for four clusters in the Rasht
station are obtained based on the cluster statistics. Then, ARIMA
and ANN are used to estimate the main statistics of each cluster in
ISARIMA and IANN models, respectively. For example, ARIMA
(1, 0, 3) and ARIMA(3, 0, 3) for time series of minima in the
first cluster and maxima in the third cluster are obtained for the
Gorgan station. The established LR models are finally applied to
the estimated statistics in each cluster to back-estimate forecasted
precipitation values in the validation period.
Hybrid of ISARIMA-ANN Based on Clustering Analysis
A simple ANN is used to simulate monthly precipitation and
statistics of each cluster. In fact, ANN inputs are the statistics of
each cluster. To find the optimal activation functions of the hidden
and output layers, combinations of multiple functions are tested.
The error criteria are shown in Fig. 6 for different activation
Fig. 5. Dendrogram of monthly precipitation in (a) Rasht; and
(b) Gorgan stations. The y-axis shows the Euclidean distance.
functions in February from Cluster 1 and January from Cluster 2.
Minimum RMSE was found when activation functions of tangent
sigmoid-tangent sigmoid for the January cluster and logistic
sigmoid-tangent sigmoid for the February cluster are chosen.
The RMSE score varies substantially with the selection of activa-
tion function and ranges from 19 to 53 mm (Fig. 6). This shows the
importance of activation function to be optimally selected for
reducing the modeling error. The autocorrelation of residuals,
which can display the errors in the timing of peaks or systematic
overestimation and underestimation are plotted in Fig. 7 for the
hybrid model. The ACF spikes are within the confidence limit,
therefore the residuals are random in nature. This indicates that the
hybrid model passes the diagnostic check.
The hybrid model had minimum values of RMSE, RRMSE,
MSE, MRE, and MAE (Table 1). The model with the smallest
MSE has the smallest magnitude of error and the smallest MAE
has the smallest average of error magnitudes. The goodness-of-
fit for high precipitation values is better reflected in the RMSE
score (Pannakkong et al. 2016; Hamidi et al. 2015). Fig. 8 shows
the observed and forecasted precipitation time series for all of the
models used in this study for the validation period (2014–2016).
The hybrid model was able to obtain better forecasts than the other
models and the R2 of the fitted line in the hybrid model has the
maximum value as that it increased 59% in the Rasht station and
40% in the Gorgan station relative to that for the ISARIMA model.
The comparison of the SARIMA and hybrid models in forecasting
precipitation in each month is shown in Fig. 9. The RRMSE values

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 60
50
40
RMSE 30
20
10
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0
logs- logs logs-purl logs-tangs purl-logs
Type of activation function
Fig. 6. Sensitivity of ANN performance in forecasting monthly precipitation to the type of activation function at the Gorgan station.
are large from May to August in the Rasht station, especially for the
SARIMA model. The hybrid model decreases RRMSE in the Rasht
station to 1.8 in May and below 0.7 in other months [Fig. 9(a)]. The
minimum RRMSE of the forecasts by the hybrid model is calcu-
lated in February for the Rasht station [Fig. 9(a)] with a long-term
average precipitation of 117 mm [Fig. 9(b)], and in October for the
Gorgan station [Fig. 9(a)] with a long-term average precipitation of
55 mm [Fig. 9(b)]. To assess the model performance in forecasting
seasonal precipitation, which is very crucial for the water resources
management and agricultural practices in the study region, the
monthly time series in the validation period were aggregated to ob-
tain the seasonal time series (Fig. 10). The seasonal precipitation
forecasted by the hybrid model has the smallest error and largest AI
score and the seasonal precipitation forecasted by the SARIMA
model has the largest error and smallest AI score (Fig. 10). The
maximum values of observed and forecasted precipitation by the
hybrid model were 597 and 584 mm in the Rasht station and 382
and 386 mm in the Gorgan station, which occurred in autumn.
Discussion
Coupling clustering analysis and linear regression to SARIMA
and ANN models improved the simulation accuracy, and the RMSE
score decreased 21% by ISARIMA relative to SARIMA and 11%
by IANN relative to ANN for the Rasht station and 5% and 15% by
ISARIMA and IANN, respectively, for the Gorgan station. The
improvements of the ISARIMA and IANN models prove that
the clustering analysis on subseasonal precipitation has an impor-
tant role in the accuracy of the forecasts in the study areas. The
clustering analysis extracts more information from data, and there-
fore increases the forecast accuracy. The number of clusters is
chosen by the dendrogram of the observations (Fig. 5). If the lo-
cation of a cutting point, a horizontal line in the dendrogram, moves
up (e.g., Euclidian distance of 7–7.5) (Fig. 5), the number of clus-
ters becomes low, leading to challenges in classification; however,
when the location of a cutting point moves down (e.g., Euclidian
distance of 5) (Fig. 5), the number of clusters becomes large, lead-
ing to complexity in finding months with similar precipitation pat-
terns. The performance of improved models is consistent with the
study of Wang et al. (2014) for the precipitation forecast. Wang
et al. (2014) used only the ARIMA model but in this study, in
addition to the ARIMA model, the improvement of ANN
© ASCE
J. Hydrol. Eng., 2019, 24(12): 04019053
class 2- January class 1- February
purl-purl purl-tangs tangs-logs tangs-purl tangs-tangs
performance with the clustering analysis was investigated and
we found that the clustering analysis can improve the performance
of the ANN and ARIMA forecast models with dividing data into
groups with similar characteristics. The smallest error criteria and
largest AI values were obtained for the hybrid of the ISARIMA and
ANN models based on the clustering analysis. For example, the
hybrid model improved the RRMSE and MRE scores from 0.67
to 0.50 and from 1.47 to 1 relative to the SARIMA model scores
in the Rasht station (Table 1). The outperformance of ANN, when
compared with the linear regression model, is well established in
the literature (e.g., Soares dos Santos et al. 2016; Tosun et al. 2016;
Rasouli et al. 2012; Hung et al. 2009). Soares dos Santos et al.
(2016) suggested that ANN can represent nonlinear processes that
might not be captured by the linear regression model. Also, the
ANN model can be more descriptive than the linear regression
model. The empirical relationships between predictors and predic-
tands in the linear regression model are assumed to be known while
in the reality atmospheric processes are complex and we cannot
detect the exact relationships between the variables. Therefore,
linear regressions have insufficient capacity to forecast phenomena
with a nonlinear nature, e.g., precipitation (Adamowski and
Karapataki 2010). The results in this paper showed that the hybrid
model outperformed the other models and that coupling the
ARIMA model to the hybrid model successfully improved the fore-
cast skills even better than those reported in previous studies
(e.g., Zeynoddin et al. 2018; Pannakkong et al. 2016; Wang et al.
2014, 2015). One advantage of ANN is its capacity to incorporate
temporal variability, concurrent values, and various predictive val-
ues as input without any additional effort (Soares dos Santos et al.
2016). The minimum values of RRMSE in the Rasht and Gorgan
stations belong to February (0.17) and March (0.13), which are
similar to the results reported by Wang et al. (2014). The scatter
diagram of observed and simulated precipitation in Fig. 8 shows
that monthly precipitation values are overestimated slightly by
the hybrid model and substantially by the other models. The pre-
diction interval for the hybrid model is provided by the shaded area
around the precipitation forecast (Fig. 8). Wang et al. (2014)
showed an overestimation of precipitation, especially in October,
and similarly, in this study, precipitation is slightly overestimated
in the Rasht and Gorgan stations in the validation period. The maxi-
mum and minimum values of the observed Rasht precipitation time
series in the validation period occurred in October and June in
2014, which are consistent with maximum and minimum values
04019053-8 J. Hydrol. Eng.
 1.0

1.0
0.8

0.8
0.6

0.6
0.4

0.4
ACF

ACF
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0.2

0.2
0.0

0.0
−0.2

−0.2
(a) 0 5 10 15 (c) 0 5 10 15
0.3

0.3
0.2

0.2
0.1

0.1
Partial ACF

Partial ACF
0.0

0.0
−0.1

−0.1
−0.2

−0.2
−0.3

−0.3

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
(b) Lag (Month) (d) Lag (Month)

Fig. 7. Autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions of the residuals of the hybrid model in (a and b) Rasht; and (c and d) Gorgan stations.
Both ACF and PACF values are within the 95% confidence intervals, which show the randomness of the residuals.

of precipitation forecasted by the hybrid model. The maximum
monthly precipitation was observed in October 2014 (370 mm)
for the Rasht station and in March 2014 (99 mm) for the Gorgan
station. The maximum observed and forecasted precipitation val-
ues are in good agreement. The maximum RRMSE is calculated
in May for the Rasht station [Fig. 9(a)] with a long-term average
precipitation of 48 mm [Fig. 9(b)], and in May for the Gorgan
station [Fig. 9(a)] with a long-term average precipitation of
39 mm [Fig. 9(b)]. The RMSE scores in the Rasht station are
relatively smaller in the wet season (October to January) than
spring and summer months [Fig. 9(a)]. This shows that precipi-
tation forecast in wet months is more skillful than the relatively
dry months, especially in the Rasht station with a humid climate.
This is further evidence that the proposed hybrid model performs
better than the SARIMA model. The forecast accuracy measures
also show that the ANN model, in comparison to the SARIMA

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J. Hydrol. Eng., 2019, 24(12): 04019053

 Table 1. Comparison of the performance of the five forecast models and associated error scores in the Rasht and Gorgan stations
Rasht Gorgan
Model RMSE (mm) RRMSE MRE MSE (mm2 ) MAE (mm) AI RMSE (mm) RRMSE MRE MAE (mm) MSE (mm2 ) AI
SARIMA 88.6 0.87 2.96 7,855 84.6 0.69 24.1 0.67 1.47 19.8 583 0.66
ISARIMA 69.7 0.68 0.88 4,867 47.0 0.71 22.9 0.64 1.44 17.0 526 0.68
ANN 63.3 0.62 1.47 4,011 43.7 0.62 23.4 0.65 1.46 18.3 549 0.45
IANN 56.6 0.55 1.00 3,209 41.4 0.87 19.9 0.55 1.10 14.7 396 0.66
ISARIMA-ANN 45.7 0.44 0.68 2,087 35.4 0.91 18.2 0.50 1.00 12.3 333 0.77

500
Obs
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400 SARIMA
ISARIMA
300 ANN
IANN
200
Hybrid

100
Precipitation [mm]

(a)
120

100

80

60

40

20

0
2014 A J N 2015 A J N 2016 A J N
(b)
400 100
SARIMA
Forecasted precipitation [mm]

ISARIMA
ANN 80
300
IANN
Hybrid 60
200
40

100
20

0 0
0 100 200 300 400 0 20 40 60 80 100
Observed precipitation [mm]
(c) (d)

Fig. 8. Forecasted monthly precipitation in (a and c) Rasht; and (b and d) Gorgan stations for the period of January 2014 through December 2016. The
shaded areas in (a and b) show the prediction interval for the proposed hybrid model. For computing the prediction interval, a Gaussian distribution
with conditional mean equal to the hybrid model predictions and constant variance equal to the variance of the prediction residuals are used.

model, has smaller errors (Table 1). Better performance of the
ANN model relative to the ARIMA model is reported in the lit-
erature (e.g., Sulaiman and Wahab 2018; Ouyang et al. 2016;
Kumar Nanda et al. 2013; Somvanshi et al. 2006). Nonlinear
characteristics of the ANN models allow them to capture nonlin-
ear atmospheric processes better than the linear ARIMA model
(Sulaiman and Wahab 2018).
Conclusion
Despite improvements in theory and computational capacities, pre-
cipitation forecast still remains one of the most challenging tasks in
water resources management and planning. One of the widely used
statistical models to forecast precipitation is SARIMA, which
combines the values and noise so that the forecast values are very

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J. Hydrol. Eng., 2019, 24(12): 04019053

 5
similar to the observations. In order to account for the interannual
4.5 SARIMA - Gorgan
and intermonthly variations, the SARIMA and ANN models are
4 Hybrid - Gorgan
improved based on temporal precipitation clusters. The improved
3.5 SARIMA - Rasht
Hybrid - Rasht
versions of these models are called ISARIMA and IANN. In this
3
RRMSE

study, the ISARIMA model is further improved and a hybrid model

2.5
of ISARIMA and ANN is proposed based on subseasonal precipi-
2 tation groups obtained from hierarchical clustering analysis.
1.5 The intermonthly variation in the precipitation fluctuations is also
1 incorporated into the hybrid model. The model is evaluated in the
0.5 Gorgan and Rasht weather stations located near the Caspian Sea.
0 The results show that when the clustering analysis is conducted on
(a) Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
precipitation data, the forecast skill improves substantially and the
RMSE score decreases 21% by ISARIMA relative to SARIMA and
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SARIMA - Gorgan 11% by IANN relative to ANN in the Rasht station. The clustering
200 Hybrid - Gorgan 200 analysis improves the performance of the forecast models by
SARIMA - Rasht searching analogous precipitation patterns over the long observa-

Mean (1976-2016)
150 Hybrid - Rasht 150 tion period (1976–2013) and grouping them into clusters with sim-
Mean - Gorgan ilar characteristics. When ISARIMA is coupled to ANN in the
RMSE

Mean - Rasht
100 100 hybrid model, the forecast skill is further improved and the RMSE
score of the forecasted precipitation against the observations de-
50 50
creased by 48% for the Rasht station and 24% for the Gorgan sta-
tion relative to the SARIMA forecasts. This is because of the added
value of the ANN model by capturing temporal variability. Appli-
0 0
(b) Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
cation of the ANN model, instead of a regression model, captures
the nonlinear relationships between main statistics of monthly pre-
Fig. 9. Performance of the SARIMA and hybrid models in monthly cipitation clusters and associated precipitation intensities. More
precipitation forecasting in the validation period with two statistical skillful monthly precipitation forecasts were obtained from the hy-
measures: (a) RRMSE; and (b) RMSE. brid model in comparison to the other statistical models, which are
reflected in the forecast skill of the seasonal precipitation. This sug-
gests that the hybrid model can be reliably used for forecasting pre-
cipitation and other complex phenomena in similar climates and
regions and across temporal scales and for better management
of water resources and agricultural activities.

RRMSE-Gorgan
1.4 MRE-Gorgan Acknowledgments
AI-Gorgan
1.2
RRMSE-Rasht
The research was funded by Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University.
1 MRE-Rasht
Kabir Rasouli was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engi-
Error criteria

AI-Rasht
0.8
neering Research Council, NSERC’s Postdoctoral fellowship.
The manuscript benefitted from the comments and suggestions
0.6 of the editor and the anonymous reviewers on a previous version.
0.4

0.2
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