A comparative analysis of artificial neural network and support vector regression for river suspended sediment load prediction

Abstract

The artificial neural network (ANN) model and support vector regression (SVR) model have gained tremendous popularity among the researchers during the past couple of decades. Both of the models are very powerful in prediction and have several applications in different fields, which also include suspended sediment load prediction. In this work, the predictive capability of ANN and SVR model is investigated to estimate the daily suspended sediment load (SSL) in Tawang Chu River, Jang of Arunachal Pradesh, India. The performance of the models is evaluated using three quality measuring parameters, i.e., mean squared error (MSE), root-mean-square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE). From the experimental results, one can conclude that the predictive capability of SVR is better compared to ANN in terms of all of the quality measuring parameters.