Rainfall prediction in the northeast region of Thailand using Modular Fuzzy Inference System

In water management systems, accurate rainfall forecasting is indispensable for operation and management of reservoir, and flooding prevention because it can provide an extension of lead-time of the flow forecasting. In general, time series prediction has been widely applied to predict rainfall data. The conventional time series prediction models or artificial neural networks can be used to perform this task. However, such models are difficult to interpret by human analyst. From a hydrologist´s point of view, the accuracy of the prediction and understanding the prediction model are equally important. This study proposes the use of a Modular Fuzzy Inference System (Mod FIS) to predict monthly rainfall data in the northeast region of Thailand. The experimental results show that the proposed model can be a good alternative method to provide both accurate results and human-understandable prediction mechanism.