Affiliations 

  • 1 Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
  • 2 Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
MATEMATIKA, 2018;34(101):167-177.
MyJurnal

Abstract

Rainfall is an interesting phenomenon to investigate since it is directly related
to all aspects of life on earth. One of the important studies is to investigate and under-
stand the rainfall patterns that occur throughout the year. To identify the pattern, it
requires a rainfall curve to represent daily observation of rainfall received during the year.
Functional data analysis methods are capable to convert discrete data intoa function that
can represent the rainfall curve and as a result, try to describe the hidden patterns of the
rainfall. This study focused on the distribution of daily rainfall amount using functional
data analysis. Fourier basis functions are used for periodic rainfall data. Generalized
cross-validation showed 123 basis functions were sufficient to describe the pattern of daily
rainfall amount. North and west areas of the peninsula show a significant bimodal pattern
with the curve decline between two peaks at the mid-year. Meanwhile,the east shows uni-
modal patterns that reached a peak in the last three months. Southern areas show more
uniform trends throughout the year. Finally, the functional spatial method is introduced
to overcome the problem of estimating the rainfall curve in the locations with no data
recorded. We use a leave one out cross-validation as a verification method to compare
between the real curve and the predicted curve. We used coefficient of basis functions
to get the predicted curve. It was foundthatthe methods ofspatial prediction can match
up with theexistingspatialpredictionmethodsin terms of accuracy,but it isbetterasthe new
approach provides a simpler calculation.