Support Vector Machine and Neural Network based Model for Monthly Stream Flow Forecasting

Abstract

Accurate forecasting of streamflow is desired in many water resources planning and management, flood prevention and design development. In this study, the accuracy of two hybrid model, support vector machine - particle swarm optimization (SVM-PSO) and bat algorithm – backpropagation neural network (BA-BPNN) for monthly streamflow forecasting at Kuantan River located in Peninsular Malaysia are investigated and compared to regular SVM and BPNN model. Heuristic optimization namely PSO and BA are introduced to find the optimum SVM and BPNN parameters. The input parameters to the forecasting models are antecedent streamflow, historical rainfall and meteorological parameters namely evaporation, temperature, relative humidity and mean wind speed. Two performance evaluation measure, root mean square error (RMSE) and coefficient of determination (R2) were employed to evaluate the performance of developed forecasting model. It is found that, RMSE and R2 for hybrid SVM-PSO are 24.8267 m3/s and 0.9651 respectively while general SVM model yields RMSE of 27.5086 m3/s and 0.9305 of R2 for testing phase. Besides that, hybrid BA-BPNN produces RMSE, 17.7579 m3/s and R2, 0.7740 while BPNN model produces lower RMSE and R2 of 28.1396 m3/s and 0.5015 respectively. Therefore, the results indicate that hybrid model, SVM-PSO and Bat-BPNN yield better performance as compared to general SVM and BPNN, respectively in streamflow forecasting.