Prediction of Flood in Barak River using Hybrid Machine Learning Approaches: A Case Study

Flooding causes several threats with outcomes which include peril to human and animal life, damage to property, and adversity to agricultural fields. Therefore, flood prediction is of prime importance for reducing loss of life and devastation to property. To model complex nature of hydrologic processes artificial neural network (ANN) tool is effectively being utilized for modelling different nonlinear relationships, and has proved to be an appropriate method for flood prediction. Present study investigated relative accuracy of radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) and support vector machine (SVM) models combined with Firefly Algorithm (FA) in predicting river flood discharge and contrasted with that of regular ANN, RBFNN and SVM models. Monthly river flow data of Silchar and Dholai stations located in Cachar district of Assam, India are utilized for the present study. For assessing model performance, coefficient of determination (R-2), mean square error (MSE) and root mean square error (RMSE) were measured. Evaluation of outcomes shows that both RBF-FA (radial basis function - firefly algorithm) and SVM-FA (support vector machine - firefly algorithm) hybrid models give more precise forecasting results than RBFNN, FFBPNN (feed forward back propagation neural network) and SVM models. Yet, it can be observed that SVM-FA model give better forecasting outputs with R-2 value 0.9818 than RBF-FA model. Results also reveal that simple SVM model performs marginally better than simple ANN model.