Long-term Streamflow Forecasting by Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System Using K-fold Cross-validation: (Case Study: Taleghan Basin, Iran)

Streamflow forecasting has an important role in water resource management (e.g. flood control, drought management, reservoir design, etc.). In this paper, the application of Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) is used for long-term streamflow forecasting (monthly, seasonal) and moreover, cross-validation method (K-fold) is investigated to evaluate test-training data in the model.Then, the results are compared with those of the typical validation method (i.e., using 75% of data for training and the remaining 25% for testing the validity of the trained model). Study area is Taleghan basin located in northwestern Tehran basin, Iran. The data used in this research consists of 19 years of monthly streamflow, precipitation and temperature records. To apply temperature and precipitation data in the model, the whole basin was divided into sub-basins and average values of each parameter for each sub-basin were allocated as model input. Finally, results were compared with those of the ANN model. It was found that the K-fold validation method leads to better performance than the typical method in terms of statistical indices. In addition, the results indicated the superiority of ANFIS model over ANN model in long-term forecasting.