Application of Support Vector Regression for Modeling Low Flow Time Series

Hydrologic time series modeling using historical records plays a crucial role in forecasting different hydrological processes. The objective of this study is to analyze the suitability of Support Vector Regression (SVR) for modeling monthly low flows time series for three stations in Mahanadi river basin, India. The ‘low flow’ threshold was taken as the Q75 discharge, i.e., the flow is equal to or surpassed for the duration of 75% of the observation period which was obtained from the daily discharge data. The potential applicability of SVR model is assessed with two different framework models (ANN-ELM, GPR) based on various statistical measures (r2, RMSE, MAE, Nash-Sutcliffe coefficient, objective function (OBJ), Scatter Index (SI) and BIAS). The model selection was based on lowest OBJ value for each station amongst three models (SVR, ANN-ELM, GPR). The SVR model was trained using the Radial Basis Function (RBF). Using the same inputs, the other two models (ANN-ELM and GPR) was also tested. From results, among all the stations, the SVR outperformed GPR and ANN-ELM with lowest OBJ value for the three stations a (1.378, 1.202, 1.570). In addition, the accuracy of the three models were checked using mean forecasting error which were (0.474, 0.421, 0.509) for SVR, (0.507, 0.489 0.500) for GPR and (0.564, 0.603, 0.772) ANN-ELM for the three stations. The results confirm that SVR can be used satisfactorily for modeling monthly low flows in the Mahanadi river basin, India. Hence, the SVR model could be employed as a new reliable and accurate data intelligent approach for predicting the ‘low flow’ (Q75 discharge) based on precedent data in water resources and its allied field.