Journal of Cybersecurity and Information Management JCIM 2690-6775 2769-7851 10.54216/JCIM https://www.americaspg.com/journals/show/2968 2019 2019 Drought Prediction with Feature Enhanced LSTM Model using Metaheuristic Optimization Algorithms SCOPE Vellore Institute of Technology Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India A. A. SCOPE Vellore Institute of Technology Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India A. Mary Mekala The impact of drought builds on all three fronts of economy, environment, and society is devastating. Predicting its arrival and duration is highly important to arrange any sort of mitigation plans. The association of detailed relationship between multiple variables makes drought prediction a highly complex task. Especially influence of global warming, polar sea extent variations and their influence on overall ocean temperature have altered the seasonal rainfall behaviors all over the world. In the midst of it, predictions centered on the history of rainfall levels become inaccurate. The proposed system is an optimized deep learning prediction model integrating indigenous knowledge (IK) is proposed to predict the drought. IK expressed in human language is translated using fuzzy function and fed to an improved Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model. The LSTM model hyperparameters are optimized using a hybrid of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) with firefly to produce the meta-heuristics algorithm which will provide the best performance in presence of integration of IK features into modern meteorological features which solves the problem of local minima in LSTM hyperparameter optimization. The performance of the proposed results were tested compared with the meteorological information gathered by the Karnataka Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre (KNDMC) for the district named Chitradurga of the Karnataka state in India. The proposed system which is  Indigenous Knowledge merged along the cross model attention network can produce at least 1.4% higher Nash–Sutcliffe model efficiency coefficient (NSE) and 30% lower Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in the prediction of Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) compared to Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) and LSTM based time series prediction models. 2024 2024 115 131 10.54216/JCIM.140208 https://www.americaspg.com/articleinfo/2/show/2968