Optimizing the decomposition of soil moisture time-series data using genetic algorithms

Abstract:

The task of determining near-surface volumetric water content (VWC), using commonly available dielectric sensors (based upon capacitance or frequency domain technology), is made challenging due to the presence of “noise” such as temperature-driven diurnal variations in the recorded data. We analyzed a post-wildfire rainfall and runoff monitoring dataset for hazard studies in Southern California. VWC was measured with EC-5 sensors manufactured by Decagon Devices. Many traditional signal smoothing techniques such as moving averages, splines, and Loess smoothing exist. Unfortunately, when applied to our post-wildfire dataset, these techniques diminish maxima, introduce time shifts, and diminish signal details. A promising seasonal trend-decomposition procedure based on Loess (STL) decomposes VWC time series into trend, seasonality, and remainder components. Unfortunately, STL with its default parameters produces similar results as previously mentioned smoothing methods.

We propose a novel method to optimize seasonal decomposition using STL with genetic algorithms. This method successfully reduces “noise” including diurnal variations while preserving maxima, minima, and signal detail. Better decomposition results for the post-wildfire VWC dataset were achieved by optimizing STL’s control parameters using genetic algorithms. The genetic algorithms minimize an additive objective function with three weighted terms: (i) root mean squared error (RMSE) of straight line relative to STL trend line; (ii) range of STL remainder; and (iii) variance of STL remainder. Our optimized STL method, combining trend and remainder, provides an improved representation of signal details by preserving maxima and minima as compared to the traditional smoothing techniques for the post-wildfire rainfall and runoff monitoring data. This method identifies short- and long-term VWC seasonality and provides trend and remainder data suitable for forecasting VWC in response to precipitation.