Improving multilayer perceptron on rainfall data using modified genetics algorithm

Abstract

Rainfall prediction is essential for managing water resources, agriculture, and disaster response, particularly in regions affected by climate variability. This study introduces a modified genetic algorithm (MGA) to optimize hyperparameters of a multilayer perceptron (MLP) for rainfall forecasting. The MGA incorporates elitism to retain top-performing solutions and adaptive selection based on model accuracy. The proposed MGA–MLP model was tested on rainfall datasets from Australia and Indonesia (BMKG). Experimental results show that configurations with two hidden layers, rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation and limited-memory Broyden Fletcher Goldfarb Shannon (LBFGS) optimizer, a learning rate of 0.001 and 1000 epochs consistently delivered strong performance. The model achieved accuracies of 86.02% and 79.05%, respectively. These findings indicate that MGA significantly improves MLP performance and provides a reliable, generalizable method for rainfall prediction across diverse climatic conditions.