A modified neural network for improving river flow prediction

Abstract

Artificial neural network (ANN) models provide huge potential for simulating nonlinear behaviour of hydrological systems. However, the potential of ANN is yet to be fully exploited due to the problems associated with improving the model generalization performance. Generalization refers to the ability of a neural network to correctly process input data that have not been used for calibrating the neural network model. In the hydrological context, better generalization performance implies higher precision of forecasting. The primary objectives of this study are to explore new measures for improving the generalization performance of an ANN-based rainfall-runoff model, and to evaluate the applicability of the new measures. A modified neural network model (entitled goal programming (GP) neural network) for modelling the rainfall-runoff process has been developed, in which three enhancements are made as compared to the widely-used backpropagation (BP) network. The three enhancements are (a) explicit integration of hydrological prior knowledge into the neural network learning; (b) incorporation of a modified training objective function; and (c) reduction of network sensitivity to input errors. Seven watersheds across a range of climatic conditions and watershed areas in China were selected for examining the alternative networks. The results demonstrate that the GP consistently outperformed the BP both in the calibration and verification periods and three proposed measures yielded improvement of performance. Copyright © 2005 IAHS Press.