A new machine learning method for rainfall classification: temporal random tree


BİRANT K. U., Ghasemkhani B., VARLIKLAR Ö., BİRANT D.

PEERJ COMPUTER SCIENCE, cilt.11, 2025 (SCI-Expanded) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 11
  • Basım Tarihi: 2025
  • Doi Numarası: 10.7717/peerj-cs.3022
  • Dergi Adı: PEERJ COMPUTER SCIENCE
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Compendex, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Machine learning, Rainfall classification, Random tree, Spatiotemporal data, Classification, Temporal weighting, Precipitation prediction, Weather pattern, Rain/no-rain, Artificial intelligence
  • Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Traditional classification algorithms usually assume that all samples in a dataset contribute equally to the training of a machine learning model, which is not always the case. In fact, samples in temporal data, such as precipitation data, may not have equal importance; more recent samples contain more accurate and useful information than earlier ones. To address this issue, the article proposes a novel method, named temporal random tree (TRT), in which recent training samples have a greater impact on the model's decision-making process. It divides the dataset into temporal segments, assigns higher weights to classifiers trained on more recent data, and employs a weighted majority voting strategy. The experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of TRT on the real-world WeatherAUS precipitation dataset, achieving an accuracy of 83.54%, which represents a 5% improvement over the traditional random tree method. Additionally, our method achieved an average improvement of 9.98% compared to state-of-the-art results in the recent literature. These findings highlight TRT's potential as a valuable method for spatiotemporal rainfall classification.