Recurrent neural network modeling of multivariate time series and its application in temperature forecasting

Abstract

Temperature forecasting plays an important role in human production and operational activities. Traditional temperature forecasting mainly relies on numerical forecasting models to operate, which takes a long time and has higher requirements for the computing power and storage capacity of computers. In order to reduce computation time and improve forecast accuracy, deep learning-based temperature forecasting has received more and more attention. Based on the atmospheric temperature, dew point temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, and cumulative wind speed data of five cities in China from 2010 to 2015 in the UCI database, multivariate time series atmospheric temperature forecast models based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) are established. Firstly, the temperature forecast modeling of five cities in China is established by RNN for five different model configurations; secondly, the neural network training process is controlled by using the Ridge Regularizer (L2) to avoid overfitting and underfitting; and finally, the Bayesian optimization method is used to adjust the hyper-parameters such as network nodes, regularization parameters, and batch size to obtain better model performance. The experimental results show that the atmospheric temperature prediction error based on LSTM RNN obtained a minimum error compared to using the base models, and these five models obtained are the best models for atmospheric temperature prediction in the corresponding cities. In addition, the feature selection method is applied to the established models, resulting in simplified models with higher prediction accuracy.