Reference Evapotranspiration(ETo)iswidely used to assess totalwater loss between land and atmosphere due to its importance in maintaining the atmospheric water balance,especially in agricultural and environmental mana...Reference Evapotranspiration(ETo)iswidely used to assess totalwater loss between land and atmosphere due to its importance in maintaining the atmospheric water balance,especially in agricultural and environmental management.Accurate estimation of ETo is challenging due to its dependency onmultiple climatic variables,including temperature,humidity,and solar radiation,making it a complexmultivariate time-series problem.Traditional machine learning and deep learning models have been applied to forecast ETo,achieving moderate success.However,the introduction of transformer-based architectures in time-series forecasting has opened new possibilities formore precise ETo predictions.In this study,a novel algorithm for ETo forecasting is proposed,focusing on four transformer-based models:Vanilla Transformer,Informer,Autoformer,and FEDformer(Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer),applied to an ETo dataset from the Andalusian region.The novelty of the proposed algorithm lies in determining optimized window sizes based on seasonal trends and variations,which were then used with each model to enhance prediction accuracy.This custom window-sizing method allows the models to capture ETo’s unique seasonal patterns more effectively.Finally,results demonstrate that the Informer model outperformed other transformer-based models,achievingmean square error(MSE)values of 0.1404 and 0.1445 for forecast windows(15,7)and(30,15),respectively.The Vanilla Transformer also showed strong performance,closely following the Informermodel.These findings suggest that the proposed optimized window-sizing approach,combined with transformer-based architectures,is highly effective for ETo modelling.This novel strategy has the potential to be adapted in othermultivariate time-series forecasting tasks that require seasonality-sensitive approaches.展开更多
基金funded by Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University and Researchers Supporting Project number(PNURSP2024R136),Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University,Riyadh,Saudi Arabia.
文摘Reference Evapotranspiration(ETo)iswidely used to assess totalwater loss between land and atmosphere due to its importance in maintaining the atmospheric water balance,especially in agricultural and environmental management.Accurate estimation of ETo is challenging due to its dependency onmultiple climatic variables,including temperature,humidity,and solar radiation,making it a complexmultivariate time-series problem.Traditional machine learning and deep learning models have been applied to forecast ETo,achieving moderate success.However,the introduction of transformer-based architectures in time-series forecasting has opened new possibilities formore precise ETo predictions.In this study,a novel algorithm for ETo forecasting is proposed,focusing on four transformer-based models:Vanilla Transformer,Informer,Autoformer,and FEDformer(Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer),applied to an ETo dataset from the Andalusian region.The novelty of the proposed algorithm lies in determining optimized window sizes based on seasonal trends and variations,which were then used with each model to enhance prediction accuracy.This custom window-sizing method allows the models to capture ETo’s unique seasonal patterns more effectively.Finally,results demonstrate that the Informer model outperformed other transformer-based models,achievingmean square error(MSE)values of 0.1404 and 0.1445 for forecast windows(15,7)and(30,15),respectively.The Vanilla Transformer also showed strong performance,closely following the Informermodel.These findings suggest that the proposed optimized window-sizing approach,combined with transformer-based architectures,is highly effective for ETo modelling.This novel strategy has the potential to be adapted in othermultivariate time-series forecasting tasks that require seasonality-sensitive approaches.
