Sunspot number prediction using Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) algorithm

Sunspot is an area on photosphere layer which is dark-colored. Sunspot is very important to be researched because sunspot is affected by sunspot numbers, which present the level of solar activity. This research was conducted to make prediction on sunspot numbers using Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) algorithm. The work principle of GRU is similar to Long short-term Memory (LSTM) method: the information from the previous memory is processed through two gates, that is update gate and reset gate, then the output generated will be input for the next process. The purpose of predicting sunspot numbers was to find out the information of sunspot numbers in the future, so that if there is a significant increase in sunspot numbers, it can inform other physical consequences that may be caused. The data used was the data of monthly sunspot numbers obtained from SILSO website. The data division and parameters used were based on the results of the trials resulted in the smallest MAPE value. The smallest MAPE value obtained from the prediction was 7.171% with 70% training data, 30% testing data, 150 hidden layer, 32 batch size, 100 learning rate drop.