booktitle = "2015 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational
Intelligence",
title = "Predicting Rainfall in the Context of Rainfall
Derivatives Using Genetic Programming",
year = "2015",
pages = "711--718",
abstract = "Rainfall is one of the most challenging variables to
predict, as it exhibits very unique characteristics
that do not exist in other time series data. Moreover,
rainfall is a major component and is essential for
applications that surround water resource planning. In
particular, this paper is interested in the prediction
of rainfall for rainfall derivatives. Currently in the
rainfall derivatives literature, the process of
predicting rainfall is dominated by statistical models,
namely using a Markov-chain extended with rainfall
prediction (MCRP). In this paper we outline a new
methodology to be carried out by predicting rainfall
with Genetic Programming (GP). This is the first time
in the literature that GP is used within the context of
rainfall derivatives. We have created a new tailored GP
to this problem domain and we compare the performance
of the GP and MCRP on 21 different data sets of cities
across Europe and report the results. The goal is to
see whether GP can outperform MCRP, which acts as a
benchmark. Results indicate that in general GP
significantly outperforms MCRP, which is the dominant
approach in the literature.",