Daily Streamflow Forecasting Based on the Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization and Long Short-Term Memory Model in the Orontes Basin

Abstract

Water, a renewable but limited resource, is vital for all living creatures. Increasing demand makes the sustainability of water resources crucial. River flow management, one of the key drivers of sustainability, will be vital to protect communities from the worst impacts on the environment. Modelling and estimating river flow in the hydrological process is crucial in terms of effective planning, management, and sustainable use of water resources. Therefore, in this study, a hybrid approach integrating long short-term memory networks (LSTM) and particle swarm algorithm (PSO) was proposed. For this purpose, three hydrological stations were utilized in the study along the Orontes River basin, Karasu, Demirköprü, and Samandağ, respectively. The timespan of Demirköprü and Karasu stations in the study was between 2010 and 2019. Samandağ station data were from 2009–2018. The datasets consisted of daily flow values. In order to validate the performance of the model, the first 80% of the data were used for training, and the remaining 20% were used for the testing of the three FMSs. Statistical methods such as linear regression and the more classical model autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) were used during the comparison process to assess the proposed method’s performance and demonstrate its superior predictive ability. The estimation results of the models were evaluated with RMSE, MAE, MAPE, SD, and R2 statistical metrics. The comparison of daily streamflow predictions results revealed that the PSO-LSTM model provided promising accuracy results and presented higher performance compared with the benchmark and linear regression models.