A proper understanding and analysis of the processes involved in seasonal precipitation variability and dynamics is essential to provide reliable information about climate change and how it can affect matters of critical importance such as water availability and agricultural productivity in urban cities. Precipitation data, as many other time series data present only non-negative observations, are is not constrained by standard time series methods. In this paper, we propose a modified singular spectrum analysis (SSA) algorithm for decomposition and reconstruction of time series with non-negative values. Our approach uses a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) instead of the singular value decomposition in the SSA algorithm. The new algorithm is compared with the classic SSA algorithm by considering a simulation study and observed data of monthly precipitation of four major cities in Nigeria (Lagos, Kano, Ibadan and Kaduna). Although in terms of mean stared errors both methods give similar results, the percentage of negative fitted values for reconstructions with the classical SSA algorithm reached more than 20% in our real data application, which is inappropriate for non-negative time series. The proposed adaptation of the SSA algorithm for non-negative time series data provides an important development with applications in many fields where time series data has non-negative constraints.
