River flow forecasting: use of phase-space reconstruction and artificial neural networks approaches

Abstract

The use of two non-linear black-box approaches, phase-space reconstruction (PSR) and artificial neural networks (ANN), for forecasting river flow dynamics is studied and a comparison of their performances is made. This is done by attempting 1-day and 7-day ahead forecasts of the daily river flow from the Nakhon Sawan station at the Chao Phraya River basin in Thailand. The results indicate a reasonably good performance of both approaches for both 1-day and 7-day ahead forecasts. However, the performance of the PSR approach is found to be consistently better than that of ANN. One reason for this could be that in the PSR approach the flow series in the phase-space is represented step by step in local neighborhoods, rather than a global approximation as is done in ANN. Another reason could be the use of the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) in ANN, since MLPs may not be most appropriate for forecasting at longer lead times. The selection of training set for the ANN may also contribute to such results. A comparison of the optimal number of variables for capturing the flow dynamics, as identified by the two approaches, indicates a large discrepancy in the case of 7-day ahead forecasts (1 and 7 variables, respectively), though for 1-day ahead forecasts it is found to be consistent (3 variables). A possible explanation for this could be the influence of noise in the data, an observation also made from the 1-day ahead forecast results using the PSR approach. The present results lead to observation on: (1) the use of other neural networks for runoff forecasting, particularly at longer lead times; (2) the influence of training set used in the ANN; and (3) the effect of noise on forecast accuracy, particularly in the PSR approach.