Comparative Study of MLP and RBF Neural Networks for Estimation of Suspended Sediments in Pari River, Perak

Estimation of suspended sediments in rivers using soft computing techniques has been extensively performed around the world since 1990’s. However, accuracy in the results was always found to be highly desired and a profound crucial task. This study presents a thorough comparison between the performances of best basis function of Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and the best training algorithm in Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural networks for prediction of suspended sediments in Pari River, Perak, Malaysia. Time series data of water discharge and suspended sediments was used to develop MLP and RBF models. A comparison between six basis functions was performed to identify the most appropriate and best basis function for the selected time series of the river’s data. The performance of the models was compared using several statistical measures including coefficient of determination, coefficient of efficiency and mean absolute error. The performance of the best RBF function was compared with the previously identified best training algorithm of MLP neural networks. The results showed that comparison of various basis functions is always advantageous to achieve the most appropriate basis function for the accurate prediction of the time series data. The results also showed that the performances of both particular RBF and MLP models were close to each other and capable to capture the exact pattern of the sediment data in the river. However, the RBF model showed some inconsistency while predicting the time series data. Furthermore, RBF modeling required more investigation to choose appropriate value for the predefined parameters as compared to