Forecasting the 10.7-cm Solar Radio Flux Using Deep CNN-LSTM Neural Networks

Abstract

Predicting the time series of 10.7-cm solar radio flux is a challenging task because of its daily variability. This paper proposed a non-linear method, a convolutional and recurrent neural network combined model to achieve end-to-end F10.7 forecasts. The network consists of a one-dimensional convolutional neural network and a long short-term memory network. The CNN network extracted features from F10.7 original data, then trained the feature signals in the long short-term memory network, and outputted the predicted values. The F10.7 daily data during 2003–2014 are used for the testing set. The mean absolute percentage error values of approximately 2.04%, 2.78%, and 4.66% for 1-day, 3-day, and 7-day forecasts, respectively. The statistical results of evaluating the root mean square error, spearman correlation coefficient shows a superior effect as a whole for the 1–27 days forecast, compared with the ordinary single neural network and combination models.