Highly Accurate Prediction Model for Daily Runoff in Semi-Arid Basin Exploiting Metaheuristic Learning Algorithms

Developing trustworthy rainfall-runoff (R-R) models can offer serviceable information for planning and managing water resources. Use of artificial neural network (ANN) in adopting such models and predicting changes in runoff has become popular among many hydrologists from a long time. However, since the optimization is the most significant phase in ANN training, researchers’ attentiveness has been attracted to the ANN’s biggest problem, i.e. its susceptibility of being blocked in local minima. Consequently, use of genetic algorithms (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), firefly algorithm (FFA) and improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) approaches to increase the performance of ANN, have gained remarkable interest among distinct modern heuristic optimization approaches. In this paper, the capability of four improved ANN methods, hybrid GA-based ANN, PSO-based ANN, FFA-based ANN and IPSO-based ANN in modeling rainfall-runoff (R-R) is investigated. IPSO has been used in order to increase the ability of PSO, where the new positions of particles are dynamically adjusted using two procedures which is given form the velocity obtained by PSO and proposed velocity in IPSO. The random normal grated number with a dynamical scale factor is used to compute the new position of the best particles in proposed velocity. Daily R-R data from six stations distributed in the Seybouse watershed located in semi-arid region in Algeria were used in models’ development. The selection of the input data sets was carried out using the autocorrelation, partial autocorrelation and cross correlation functions. The results of the four hybrid models were compared via performance metrics, viz., Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Pearson’s correlation coefficient (R), Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency coefficient (NSE), and via graphical analysis (scatter plots, time series and Taylor diagram). Outcomes of the analysis at all study stations disclosed that all the ANN models enhanced with IPSO overachieved the GA-based ANN, PSO-based ANN and FFA-based ANN models in estimating runoff for both training and testing periods. The outcomes of the study indicate that the IPSO hybrid metaheuristic algorithm is the best technique in improving ANN capability in modeling daily R-R