Comparison of artificial neural network models for hydrologic predictions at multiple gauging stations in an agricultural watershed

This paper reports on an evaluation of the use of artificial neural network (ANN) models to forecast daily flows at multiple gauging stations in Eucha Watershed, an agricultural watershed located in north-west Arkansas and north-east Oklahoma. Two different neural network models, the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and the radial basis neural network (RBFNN), were developed and their abilities to predict stream flow at four gauging stations were compared. Different scenarios using various combinations of data sets such as rainfall and stream flow at various lags were developed and compared for their ability to make flow predictions at four gauging stations. The input vector selection for both models involved quantification of the statistical properties such as cross-, autoand partial autocorrelation of the data series that best represented the hydrologic response of the watershed. Measured data with 739 patterns of input–output vector were divided into two sets: 492 patterns for training, and the remaining 247 patterns for testing. The best performance based on the RMSE, R2 and CE was achieved by the MLP model with current and antecedent precipitation and antecedent flow as model inputs. The MLP model testing resulted in R2 values of 0Ð86, 0Ð86, 0Ð81, and 0Ð79 at the four gauging stations. Similarly, the testing R2 values for the RBFNN model were 0Ð60, 0Ð57, 0Ð58, and 0Ð56 for the four gauging stations. Both models performed satisfactorily for flow predictions at multiple gauging stations, however, the MLP model outperformed the RBFNN model. The training time was in the range 1–2 min for MLP, and 5–10 s for RBFNN on a Pentium IV processor running at 2Ð8 GHz with 1 MB of RAM. The difference in model training time occurred because of the clustering methods used in the RBFNN model. The RBFNN uses a fuzzy min-max network to perform the clustering to construct the neural network which takes considerably less time than the MLP model. Results show that ANN models are useful tools for forecasting the hydrologic response at multiple points of interest in agricultural watersheds. Copyright  2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.