A comparative study of artificial intelligence models for predicting monthly river suspended sediment load

Abstract

When high precision modelling is required, for example, with the estimation of suspended sediment load (SSL), data-driven models are preferred over physically-based numerical models for their real-time, short-horizon prediction ability. The investigation of SSL, as an important index in engineering practices assessment, like design and operation of the hydraulic structures not only shows the hydrological behaviour of the river, but also illustrates the valuable information about the water quality deterioration, surface-groundwater interaction and land-use changes of the watershed. The following data-driven methods were compared in order to predict SSL at the Seyra gauging station on the Karaj River in Iran: Fuzzy logic (FL), two adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (i.e., ANFIS-GP and ANFIS-FCM models), an artificial neural network (ANN), and least squares support vector machine (LSSVM). Monthly average river flow and SSL data for 50 years were obtained from the Tehran Regional Water Authority (TRWA). The data was first divided into training, validation and test sets and the SSL was then predicted using the ANN, FL, ANFIS, and LSSVM models. The reliability of the applied models was evaluated by the correlation coefficient (R), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE). The results showed that the ANFIS models outperformed the ANN, FL, and LSSVM models for predicting SSL using the given input and output data. Overall, the performances of the artificial intelligence models used in the present study were satisfac-tory in predicting the non-linear behaviour of the SSL.