Reservoir Inflow Forecast Using a Clustered Random Deep Fusion Approach in the Three Gorges Reservoir, China

Abstract

Reservoir inflow forecast plays a crucial part in programming, development, operation, and management of water resource systems. To better reveal the complex properties of daily reservoir inflow, a clustered deep fusion (CDF) approach is proposed in this paper. First, variational mode decomposition (VMD) is used to decompose the daily reservoir inflow series into multiple modes, which are clustered into different sets by fuzzy c-means according to the Xie-Beni index in view of attribute domain. In each cluster, a deep autoencoder model (DAE) is developed for deep representations of the attributes in the deep domain. DAE outputs are finally fused at the synthesis domain into the forecasting results using random forest (RF). In this way, the inflow time series may be successively observed in the attribute domain, deep domain, and synthesis domain, which results in a clearer understanding of reservoir inflow trend. The present approach is modeled and evaluated using historical data collected from the Three Gorges Reservoir, China. For comparison, two kinds of learning patterns—deep learning (VMD-DAE-RF and DAE) and shallow learning (feed-forward neural network, least-squares support regression, and RF)—are applied to the same case. The results indicate that the proposed CDF model outperforms all comparison models in terms of mean absolute percentage error (6.174%), root mean-square error (1,077.428 m3/s), and correlation coefficient criteria (0.987). Thus, it is concluded that deep learning in the cluster fusion architecture is more promising.