Wavelet neural networks using particle swarm optimization training in modeling regional ionospheric total electron content

Wavelet neural networks (WNNs) are a new class of neural networks (NNs) that has been developed using a combined method of multi-layer artificial neural networks and wavelet analysis (WA). In this paper, WNNs is used for modeling and prediction of total electron content (TEC) of ionosphere with high spatial and temporal resolution. Generally, back-propagation (BP) algorithm is used to train the neural network. While this algorithm proves to be very effective and robust in training many types of network structures, it suffers from certain disadvantages such as easy entrapment in a local minimum and slow convergence. To improve the performance of WNN in training step, the adjustment of network weights using particle swarm optimization (PSO) was proposed. The results obtained in this paper were compared with standard NN (SNN) by BP training algorithm (SNN-BP), SNN by PSO training algorithm (SNN-PSO) and WNN by BP training algorithm (WNN-BP). For numerical experiments, observations collected at 36 GPS stations in 5 days of 2012 from Iranian permanent GPS network (IPGN) are used. The average minimum relative errors in 5 test stations for WNN-PSO, WNN-BP, SNN-BP and SNN-PSO compared with GPS TEC are 10.59%, 12.85%, 13.18%, 13.75% and average maximum relative errors are 14.70%, 17.30%, 18.53% and 20.83%, respectively. Comparison of diurnal predicted TEC values from the WNN-PSO, SNN-BP, SNN-PSO and WNN-BP models with GPS TEC revealed that the WNN-PSO provides more accurate predictions than the other methods in the test area.