A framework for cloud cover prediction using machine learning with data imputation

Abstract

The climatic conditions of a region are affected by multiple factors. These factors are dew point temperature, humidity, wind speed, and wind direction. These factors are closely related to each other. In this paper, the correlation between these factors is studied and an approach has been proposed for data imputation. The idea is to utilize all these features to obtain the prediction of the total cloud cover of a region instead of removing the missing values. Total cloud cover prediction is significant because it affects the agriculture, aviation, and energy sectors. Based on the imputed data which is obtained as the output of the proposed method, a machine learning-based model is proposed. The foundation of this proposed model is the bi-directional approach of the long short-term memory (LSTM) model. It is trained for 8 stations for two different approaches. In the first approach, 80% of the entire data is considered for training and 20% of the data is considered for testing. In the second approach, 90% of the entire data is accounted for training and 10% of the data is accounted for testing. It is observed that in the first approach, the model gives less error for prediction.