  The present work is aimed to examine the potential of advanced machine
learning strategies to predict the monthly rainfall (precipitation) for the
Indus Basin, using climatological variables such as air temperature,
geo-potential height, relative humidity and elevation. In this work, the focus
is on thirteen geographical locations, called index points, within the basin.
Arguably, not all of the hydrological components are relevant to the
precipitation rate, and therefore, need to be filtered out, leading to a
lower-dimensional feature space. Towards this goal, we adopted the gradient
boosting method to extract the most contributive features for precipitation
rate prediction. Five state-of-the-art machine learning methods have then been
trained where pearson correlation coefficient and mean absolute error have been
reported as the prediction performance criteria. The Random Forest regression
model outperformed the other regression models achieving the maximum pearson
correlation coefficient and minimum mean absolute error for most of the index
points. Our results suggest the relative humidity (for pressure levels of 300
mb and 150 mb, respectively), the u-direction wind (for pressure level of 700
mb), air temperature (for pressure levels of 150 mb and 10 mb, respectively) as
the top five influencing features for accurate forecasting the precipitation
rate.
