Over the past 15 years, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been used increasingly for prediction and forecasting in water resources and environmental engineering. However, despite this high level of research activity, methods for developing ANN models are not yet well established. In this paper, the steps in the development of ANN models are outlined and taxonomies of approaches are introduced for each of these steps. In order to obtain a snapshot of current practice, ANN development methods are assessed based on these taxonomies for 210 journal papers that were published from 1999 to 2007 and focus on the prediction of water resource variables in river systems. The results obtained indicate that the vast majority of studies focus on flow prediction, with very few applications to water quality. Methods used for determining model inputs, appropriate data subsets and the best model structure are generally obtained in an ad-hoc fashion and require further attention. Although multilayer perceptrons are still the most popular model architecture, other model architectures are also used extensively. In relation to model calibration, gradient based methods are used almost exclusively. In conclusion, despite a significant amount of research activity on the use of ANNs for prediction and forecasting of water resources variables in river systems, little of this is focused on methodological issues. Consequently, there is still a need for the development of robust ANN model development approaches.

Review: Methods used for the development of neural networks for the prediction of water resource variables in river systems: Current status and future directions

On comparing three artificial neural networks for wind speed forecasting

D. B. Owen: Handbook of Statistical Tables. London: Pergamon Press; Reading, Massachusetts: Addison‐Wesley, 1962. Pp. xii+580. 70s.

Handbook of Statistical Tables.

Applications of hybrid wavelet–Artificial Intelligence models in hydrology: A review

Hydrological time series forecasting is one of the most important applications in modern hydrology, especially for effective reservoir management. In this research, the auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model coupled with the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) is presented for forecasting annual runoff time series. First, the original annual runoff time series is decomposed into a finite and often small number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and one residual series using EEMD technique for a deep insight into the data characteristics. Then each IMF component and residue is forecasted, respectively, through an appropriate ARIMA model. Finally, the forecasted results of the modeled IMFs and residual series are summed to formulate an ensemble forecast for the original annual runoff series. Three annual runoff series from Biuliuhe reservoir, Dahuofang reservoir and Mopanshan reservoir, in China, are investigated using developed model based on the four standard statistical performance evaluation measures (RMSE, MAPE, R and NSEC). The results obtained in this work indicate that EEMD can effectively enhance forecasting accuracy and that the proposed EEMD-ARIMA model can significantly improve ARIMA time series approaches for annual runoff time series forecasting.

Improving Forecasting Accuracy of Annual Runoff Time Series Using ARIMA Based on EEMD Decomposition

Estimation and forecasting of daily suspended sediment data by multi-layer perceptrons

Flow forecasting performance by artificial neural networks (ANNs) is generally considered to be dependent on the data length. In this study k -fold partitioning, a statistical method, was employed in the ANN training stage. The method was found useful in the case of using the conventional feed-forward back propagation algorithm. It was shown that with a data period much shorter than the whole training duration similar flow prediction performance could be obtained. Prediction performance and convergence velocity comparison between three different back propagation algorithms, Levenberg–Marquardt, conjugate gradient and gradient descent was the next concern of the study and the Levenberg–Marquardt technique was found advantageous thanks to its shorter training duration and more satisfactory performance criteria.

Flow prediction by three back propagation techniques using k-fold partitioning of neural network training data

Methods to improve the neural network performance in suspended sediment estimation

Estimation and forecasting of daily suspended sediment data using wavelet–neural networks

Forecasts of future events are required in many of the activities associated with the planning and operation of the components of a water resource system. For the hydrologic component, there is a need for both short- and long-term forecasts of river flow events in order to optimize the system or to plan for future expansion or reduction. This paper presents the comparison of different artificial neural network (ANN) techniques in short- and long-term continuous and intermittent daily streamflow forecasting. The studies in modelling the intermittent series are quite limited because of the complexity of fitting models in to these series. The available conventional models necessitate the adjustment of numerous parameters for calibration. Three different ANN techniques, namely, feed-forward back propagation (FFBP), generalized regression neural networks, and radial basis function-based neural networks (RBF) are applied to continuous and intermittent river flow data of two Turkish rivers for short-range and lo...

H. Kerem Cigizoglu

Papers

Estimation and forecasting of daily suspended sediment data by multi-layer perceptrons

Flow prediction by three back propagation techniques using k-fold partitioning of neural network training data

Methods to improve the neural network performance in suspended sediment estimation

Estimation and forecasting of daily suspended sediment data using wavelet–neural networks

Comparison of different ANN techniques in river flow prediction