Least squares support vector machine for short-term prediction of meteorological time series

The prediction of meteorological time series plays very important role in several fields. In this paper, an application of least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) for short-term prediction of meteorological time series (e.g. solar irradiation, air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction and pressure) is presented. In order to check the generalization capability of the LS-SVM approach, a K-fold cross-validation and Kolmogorov–Smirnov test have been carried out. A comparison between LS-SVM and different artificial neural network (ANN) architectures (recurrent neural network, multi-layered perceptron, radial basis function and probabilistic neural network) is presented and discussed. The comparison showed that the LS-SVM produced significantly better results than ANN architectures. It also indicates that LS-SVM provides promising results for short-term prediction of meteorological data.