A comparison of performance of several artificial intelligence methods for forecasting monthly discharge time series

Wen Chuan Wang, Kwok Wing Chau, Chun Tian Cheng, Lin Qiu

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

718 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Developing a hydrological forecasting model based on past records is crucial to effective hydropower reservoir management and scheduling. Traditionally, time series analysis and modeling is used for building mathematical models to generate hydrologic records in hydrology and water resources. Artificial intelligence (AI), as a branch of computer science, is capable of analyzing long-series and large-scale hydrological data. In recent years, it is one of front issues to apply AI technology to the hydrological forecasting modeling. In this paper, autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) models, artificial neural networks (ANNs) approaches, adaptive neural-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) techniques, genetic programming (GP) models and support vector machine (SVM) method are examined using the long-term observations of monthly river flow discharges. The four quantitative standard statistical performance evaluation measures, the coefficient of correlation (R), Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (E), root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), are employed to evaluate the performances of various models developed. Two case study river sites are also provided to illustrate their respective performances. The results indicate that the best performance can be obtained by ANFIS, GP and SVM, in terms of different evaluation criteria during the training and validation phases.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)294-306
Number of pages13
JournalJournal of Hydrology
Volume374
Issue number3-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Aug 2009

Keywords

  • ANFIS
  • ANN
  • ARMA
  • GP
  • Monthly discharge time series forecasting
  • SVM

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Water Science and Technology

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