Support vector regression with reduced training sets for air temperature prediction: a comparison with artificial neural networks

Sudden changes in weather, in particular extreme temperatures, can result in increased energy expenditures, depleted agricultural resources, and even loss of life. However, these ill effects can be reduced with accurate air temperature predictions that provide adequate advance warning. Support vector regression (SVR) was applied to meteorological data collected across the state of Georgia in order to produce short-term air temperature predictions. A method was proposed for reducing the number of training patterns of massively large data sets that does not require lengthy pre-processing of the data. This method was demonstrated on two large data sets: one containing 300,000 cold-weather training patterns collected during the winter months and one containing 1.25 million training patterns collected throughout the year. These patterns were used to produce predictions from 1 to 12 h ahead. The mean absolute error (MAE) for the evaluation set of winter-only patterns ranged from 0.514°C for the 1-h prediction horizon to 2.303°C for the 12-h prediction horizon. For the evaluation set of year-round patterns, the MAE ranged from 0.513°C for the 1-h prediction horizon to 1.922°C for the 12-h prediction horizon. These results were competitive with previously developed artificial neural network (ANN) models that were trained on the full data sets. For the winter-only evaluation data, the SVR models were slightly more accurate than the ANN models for all twelve of the prediction horizons. For the year-round evaluation data, the SVR models were slightly more accurate than the ANN models for three of the twelve prediction horizons.