A model for fishery forecast based on cluster analysis and nonlinear regression

There has been an increasing amount of research in the relationship between environmental factors and fishing yield. This paper adds to the body of knowledge by developing a new model for forecasting fishing yield. The model combines fishery domain expert knowledge, marine environmental factor data such as water temperature, chlorophyll concentration and sea surface level as base data and applies cluster analysis that incorporates function fitting and nonlinear regression for data analysis and processing. The model is tested for forecast accuracy and the test result is compared with those using RBF and SVM, the two methods commonly used for similar purposes. The comparison result reveals this new model increases both the accuracy in fishery forecast and the reliability in guiding fishery production and related activities. It can also help explore and discover the distribution of fishing grounds.