Extreme Rainfall Event Classification Using Machine Learning for Kikuletwa River Floods

Abstract

Advancements in machine learning techniques, availability of more data sets, and increased computing power have enabled a significant growth in a number of research areas. Predicting, detecting, and classifying complex events in earth systems which by nature are difficult to model is one such area. In this work, we investigate the application of different machine learning techniques for detecting and classifying extreme rainfall events in a sub-catchment within the Pangani River Basin, found in Northern Tanzania. Identification and classification of extreme rainfall event is a preliminary crucial task towards success in predicting rainfall-induced river floods. To identify a rain condition in the selected sub-catchment, we use data from five weather stations that have been labeled for the whole sub-catchment. In order to assess which machine learning technique is better suited for rainfall classification, we apply five different algorithms in a historical dataset for the period of 1979 to 2014. We evaluate the performance of the models in terms of precision and recall, reporting random forest and XGBoost as having the best overall performances. However, because the class distribution is imbalanced, a generic multi-layer perceptron performs best when identifying heavy rainfall events, which are eventually the main cause of rainfall-induced river floods in the Pangani River Basin.