Estimating Design Floods at Ungauged Watersheds in South Korea Using Machine Learning Models

Abstract

With recent increases of heavy rainfall during the summer season, South Korea is hit by substantial flood damage every year. To reduce such flood damage and cope with flood disasters, it is necessary to reliably estimate design floods. Despite the ongoing efforts to develop practical design practice, it has been difficult to develop a standardized guideline due to the lack of hydrologic data, especially flood data. In fact, flood frequency analysis (FFA) is impractical for ungauged watersheds, and design rainfall–runoff analysis (DRRA) overestimates design floods. This study estimated the appropriate design floods at ungauged watersheds by combining the DRRA and watershed characteristics using machine learning methods, including decision tree, random forest, support vector machine, deep neural network, the Elman recurrent neural network, and the Jordan recurrent neural network. The proposed models were validated using K-fold cross-validation to reduce overfitting and were evaluated based on various error measures. Even though the DRRA overestimated the design floods by 160%, on average, for our study areas the proposed model using random forest reduced the errors and estimated design floods at 99% of the FFA, on average.