Regionalization of Rainfall Using RCDA Cluster Ensemble Algorithm in India

Sangeeta Ahuja, C. T. Dhanya

Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India.
IASRI (ICAR), New Delhi, India.

DOI: 10.4236/jsea.2012.58065                

Abstract

The magnitude and frequency of precipitation is of great significance in the field of hydrologic and hydraulic design and has wide applications in varied areas. However, the availability of precipitation data is limited to a few areas, where the rain gauges are successfully and efficiently installed. The magnitude and frequency of precipitation in ungauged sites can be assessed by grouping areas with similar characteristics. The procedure of grouping of areas having similar behaviour is termed as Regionalization. In this paper, RCDA cluster ensemble algorithm is employed to identify the homogeneous regions of rainfall in India. Cluster ensemble methods are commonly used to enhance the quality of clustering by combining multiple clustering schemes to produce a more robust scheme delivering similar homogeneous regions. The goal is to identify, analyse and describe hydrologically similar regions using RCDA cluster ensemble algorithm. RCDA cluster ensemble algorithm, which is based on discriminant analysis. The algorithm takes H base clustering schemes each with K clusters, obtained by any clustering method, as input and constructs discriminant function for each one of them. Subsequently, all the data tuples are predicted using H discriminant functions for cluster membership. Tuples with consistent predictions are assigned to the clusters, while tuples with inconsistent predictions are analyzed further and either assigned to clusters or declared as noise. RCDA algorithm has been compared with Best of K-means and Clue cluster ensemble of R software using traditional clustering quality measures. Further, domain knowledge based comparison has also been performed. All the results are encouraging and indicate better regionalization of the rainfall in different parts of India.

Keywords

K-Means; Cluster Ensemble; Hydrology; Silhouette Coefficient; Runoff; Hydrometeorology; Precipitation; Rainfall

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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