Three Steps towards Better Forecasting for Streamflow Deep Learning

Elevating the accuracy of streamflow forecasting has always been a challenge. This paper proposes a three-step artificial intelligence model improvement for streamflow forecasting. Step 1 uses long short-term memory (LSTM), an improvement on the conventional artificial neural network (ANN). Step 2 performs multi-step ahead forecasting while establishing the rates of change as a new approach. Step 3 further improves the accuracy through three different kinds of optimization algorithms. The Stormwater and Road Tunnel project in Kuala Lumpur is the study area. Historical rainfall data of 14 years at 11 telemetry stations are obtained to forecast the flow at the confluence located next to the control center. Step 1 reveals that LSTM is a better model than ANN with R 0.9055, MSE 17,8532, MAE 1.4365, NSE 0.8190 and RMSE 5.3695. Step 2 unveils the rates of change model that outperforms the rest with R = 0.9545, MSE = 8.9746, MAE = 0.5434, NSE = 0.9090 and RMSE = 2.9958. Finally, Stage 3 is a further improvement with R = 0.9757, MSE = 4.7187, MAE = 0.4672, NSE = 0.9514 and RMSE = 2.1723 for the bat-LSTM hybrid algorithm. This study shows that the δQ model has consistently yielded promising results while the metaheuristic algorithms are able to yield additional improvement to the model’s results.