Prediction of reference evapotranspiration with missing data in Thailand

Abstract

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) has been used in prediction of reference evapotranspiration for a recent decade. Its performance is competitive to a widely used method the so-called “Penman-Monteith” method. In this study, we aim to estimate the crop evapotranspiration by ANNs from climatic data in Thailand and compare the performance with the Penman-Monteith method. As missing data is inevitable, we also included the missing data situation into the study. This can be solved by expectation-maximization algorithm. The accuracy of the prediction decreases when the amount of missing values increases. Furthermore, we exploit the feature selection in the study. It shows that sunshine duration is the most important feature followed by temperature and wide speed, respectively.