Nearshore Wave Predictions Using Data Mining Techniques during Typhoons: A Case Study near Taiwan’s Northeastern Coast

Seasonal typhoons provide energy into the wave field in summer and autumn in Taiwan. Typhoons lead to abundant wave energy near the coastal area and cause storm surges that can destroy offshore facilities. The potential for wave energy can be obtained from analyzing the wave height. To develop an effective model for predicting typhoon-induced wave height near coastal areas, this study employed various popular data mining models—namely k-nearest neighbors (kNN), linear regressions (LR), model trees (M5), multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network, and support vector regression (SVR) algorithms—as forecasting techniques. The principal component analysis (PCA) was then performed to reduce the potential variables from the original data at the first stage of data preprocessing. The experimental site was the Longdong buoy off the northeastern coast of Taiwan. Data on typhoons that occurred during 2002–2011 and 2012–2013 were collected for training and testing, respectively. This study designed four PCA cases, namely EV1, TV90, TV95, and ORI: EV1 used eigenvalues higher than 1.0 as principal components; TV90 and TV95 used the total variance percentages of 90% and 95%, respectively; and ORI used the original data. The forecast horizons varying from 1 h to 6 h were evaluated. The results show that (1) in the PCA model’ cases, when the number of attributes decreases, computing time decreases and prediction error increases; (2) regarding classified wave heights, M5 provides excellent outcomes at the small wavelet wavelet level; MLP has favorable outcomes at the large wavelet and small/moderate wave levels; meanwhile, SVR gives optimal outcomes at the long wave and high/very high wave levels; and (3) for performance of lead times, MLP and SVR achieve more favorable relative weighted performance without consideration of computational complexity; however, MLP and SVR might obtain lower performance when computational complexity is considered.