Copyright © 2010 Dunxian She and Xiaohua Yang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The embedding dimension and the number of nearest neighbors are very important parameters in the prediction of a chaotic time series. In order to reduce the uncertainties in the determination of the forgoing two parameters, a new adaptive local linear prediction method is proposed in this study. In the new method, the embedding dimension and the number of nearest neighbors are combined as a parameter set and change adaptively in the process of prediction. The generalized degree of freedom is used to help select the optimal parameters. Real hydrological time series are taken to examine the performance of the new method. The prediction results indicate that the new method can choose the optimal parameters of embedding dimension and the nearest neighbor number adaptively in the prediction process. And the nonlinear hydrological time series perhaps could be modeled better by the new method.