Enhancing Long-Term Streamflow Forecasting and Predicting using Periodicity Data Component: Application of Artificial Intelligence

Streamflow forecasting and predicting are significant concern for several applications of water resources and management including flood management, determination of river water potentials, environmental flow analysis, and agriculture and hydro-power generation. Forecasting and predicting of monthly streamflows are investigated by using three heuristic regression techniques, least square support vector regression (LSSVR), multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) and M5 Model Tree (M5-Tree). Data from four different stations, Besiri and Malabadi located in Turkey, Hit and Baghdad located in Iraq, are used in the analysis. Cross validation method is employed in the applications. In the first stage of the study, the heuristic regression models are compared with each other and multiple linear regression (MLR) in forecasting one month ahead streamflow of each station, individually. In the second stage, the models are evaluated and compared in predicting streamflow of one station using data of nearby station. The research investigated also the influence of the periodicity component (month number of the year) as an external sub-set in modeling long-term streamflow. In both stages, the comparison results indicate that the LSSVR model generally performs superior to the MARS, M5-Tree and MLR models. In addition, it is seen that adding periodicity as input to the models significantly increase their accuracy in forecasting and predicting monthly streamflows in both stages of the study.