Prediction of extremal precipitation by quantile regression forests: from SNU Multiscale Team

This paper considers the problem of spatio-temporal extreme value prediction of precipitation data. This work presents some methods that predict monthly extremes over the next 20 years corresponding to 0.998 quantile at several stations over a certain region. The proposed methods are based on a novel combination of quantile regression forests and circular transformation. As the core of the methodology, quantile regression forests by combining many decorrelated bootstrapping trees may improve prediction performance, and circular transformation is used for building circular transformed predictors of months, which are put into the quantile regression forests model for prediction. The empirical performance of the proposed methods are evaluated through real data analysis, which demonstrates promising results of the proposed approaches.