A novel approach for precipitation forecast via improved K-nearest neighbor algorithm

The prediction method plays crucial roles in accurate precipitation forecasts. Recently, machine learning has been widely used for forecasting precipitation, and the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm, one of machine learning techniques, showed good performance. In this paper, we propose an improved KNN algorithm, which offers robustness against different choices of the neighborhood size k, particularly in the case of the irregular class distribution of the precipitation dataset. Then, based our improved KNN algorithm, a new precipitation forecast approach is put forward. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the effectiveness of our proposed precipitation forecast approach based on improved KNN algorithm.