Comparing CI Methods for Prediction Models in Environmental Engineering

The prediction of fill levels in stormwater tanks is an important practical problem in water resource management. In this study state-of-the-art CI methods, i.e. Neural Networks (NN) and Genetic Programming (GP), are compared with respect to their applicability to this problem. The performance of both methods crucially depends on their parametrization. We compare different parameter tuning approaches, e.g. neuro-evolution and Sequential Parameter Optimization (SPO). In comparison to NN, GP yields superior results. By optimizing GP parameters, GP runtime can be significantly reduced without degrading result quality. The SPO-based parameter tuning leads to results with significantly lower standard deviation as compared to the GA-based parameter tuning. Our methodology can be transferred to other optimization and simulation problems, where complex models have to be tuned.