Enhanced LSTM Model for Daily Runoff Prediction in the Upper Huai River Basin, China

Abstract

Runoff prediction is of great significance to flood defense. However, due to the complexity and randomness of the runoff process, it is hard to predict daily runoff accurately, especially for peak runoff. To address this issue, this study proposes an enhanced long short-term memory (LSTM) model for runoff prediction, where novel loss functions are introduced and feature extractors are integrated. Two loss functions (peak error tanh (PET), peak error swish (PES)) are designed to strengthen the importance of the peak runoff's prediction while weakening the weight of the normal runoff's prediction. The feature extractor consisting of three LSTM networks is established for each meteorological station, aiming to extract temporal features of the input data at each station. Taking the upper Huai River Basin in China as a case study, daily runoff from 1960–2016 is predicted using the enhanced LSTM model. Results indicate that the enhanced LSTM model performed well, achieving Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) coefficient ranging from 0.917–0.924 during the validation period (November 2005–December 2016), outperforming the widely used lumped hydrological models (Australian Water Balance Model (AWBM), Sacramento, SimHyd and Tank Model) and the data-driven models (artificial neural network (ANN), support vector regression (SVR), and gated recurrent units (GRU)). The enhanced LSTM with PES as loss function performed best on extreme runoff prediction with a mean NSE for floods of 0.873. In addition, precipitation at a meteorological station with a higher altitude contributes more runoff prediction than the closest stations. This study provides an effective tool for daily runoff prediction, which will benefit the basin's flood defense and water security management.