GP Final Presentation\ Machine Learning Applications for Forecasting Monthly Rainfall in Sulaimani City

On June 13, 2023, a group of Civil Engineering Department students presented their graduation project. The graduation project title is “Machine Learning Applications for Forecasting Monthly Rainfall in Sulaimani City”, which is supervised by Mr. Sarmad Latif, a faculty member of the Civil Engineering Department. In this project, the students implemented artificial neural network (ANN) techniques to train the observed data. Later on, they developed a hybrid model namely, SARIMA-ANN in order to accurately forecast monthly rainfall. Their findings showed that SARIMA-ANN outperformed ANN model in terms of accuracy with R 2 =0.98, R 2 =0.43, and RMSE=11.5, RMSE=51.002 respectively.
A committee was formed at the departmental level to evaluate the graduation project report and presentation. The committee consists of Dr. Ako Rashed Hama (Internal Evaluator) and Dr. Kawa Zeidan from Sulaimani University (External Evaluator). Several comments and arguments were discussed during the presentation. Dr. Ako asked the students to revise the title from a general one to a more specific title. Then, he asked why the current up-to-date data was not utilized. Furthermore, he asked the students to write a summary at the end of the Literature Review chapter as well as unifying all figures in the report. On the other hand, Dr. Kawa Zeidan asked several questions, including format correction in the report. He also commented on the utilized monthly data and said it was better to use daily rainfall instead of monthly for forecasting purposes. Finally, he asked the students to write more detail about the proposed forecasting model as well as some parts in the methodology and discussion sections.
Finally, the committee accepted the graduation project report with minor changes and asked the students to revise the draft and re-submit the revised version of the report for final approval.