Forecasting River Flow in the USA: A Comparison between Auto-Regression and Neural Network Non-Parametric Models

Forecasting a time series became one of the most challenging tasks to variety of data sets. The existence of large number of parameters to be estimated and the effect of uncertainty and outliers in the measurements makes the time series modeling too complicated. Recently, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) became quite successful tool to handle time series modeling problem. This paper provides a solution to the forecasting problem of the river flow for two well known Rivers in the USA. They are the Black Water River and the Gila River. The selected ANN models were used to train and forecast the daily flows of the first station no: 02047500, for the Black Water River near Dendron in Virginia and the second station no: 0944200 for the Gila River near Clifton in Arizona. The feed forward network is trained using the conventional back propagation learning algorithm with many variations in the NN inputs. We explored models built using various historical data. The selection process of various architectures and training data sets for the proposed NN models are presented. A comparative study of both ANN and the conventional Auto-Regression (AR) model networks indicates that the artificial neural networks performed better than the AR model. Hence, we recommend ANN as a useful tool for river flow forecasting.