Estimation of dew point temperature using SVM and ELM for humid and semi-arid regions of India

Abstract

The dew point temperature is the temperature at which the moisture in the air begins to condense into dew or water droplets. The accurate estimation of the dew point temperature is very important as it controls the heat stress on humans, detects fluctuations of evaporation rates, and humidity trends. The dew point temperature is a significant parameter particularly required in various hydrological, climatological and agronomical related researches. This study proposes Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) models for the estimation of daily dew point temperature. The daily measured weather data (Wet bulb temperature, relative humidity, vapor pressure and dew point temperature) of humid and semi-arid regions of India were used for model development. The statistical indices, namely Mean Absolute Error, Root Mean Square Error, and Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency were adopted to evaluate the performances of these two models. The merit of the ELM model is evaluated against SVM technique in the estimation of dew point temperature. The proposed ELM models demonstrated much greater capability than the SVM models in the estimation of daily dew point temperature. © 2017 Indian Society for Hydraulics.