A modified correlation in principal component analysis for torrential rainfall patterns identification

Abstract

This paper presents a modified correlation in principal component analysis (PCA) for selection number of clusters in identifying rainfall patterns. The approach of a clustering as guided by PCA is extensively employed in data with high dimension especially in identifying the spatial distribution patterns of daily torrential rainfall. Typically, a common method of identifying rainfall patterns for climatological investigation employed T mode-based Pearson correlation matrix to extract the relative variance retained. However, the data of rainfall in Peninsular Malaysia involved skewed observations in the direction of higher values with pure tendencies of values that are positive. Therefore, using Pearson correlation which was basing on PCA on rainfall set of data has the potentioal to influence the partitions of cluster as well as producing exceptionally clusters that are eneven in a space with high dimension. For current research, to resolve the unbalanced clusters challenge regarding the patterns of rainfall caused by the skewed character of the data, a robust dimension reduction method in PCA was employed. Thus, it led to the introduction of a robust measure in PCA with Tukey’s biweight correlation to downweigh observations along with the optimal breakdown point to obtain PCA’s quantity of components. Outcomes of this study displayed a highly substantial progress for the robust PCA, contrasting with the PCA-based Pearson correlation in respects to the average amount of acquired clusters and indicated 70% variance cumulative percentage at the breakdown point of 0.4.