Flood River Water Level Forecasting using Ensemble Machine Learning for Early Warning Systems

Abstract

Flood forecasting is crucial for early warning system and disaster risk reduction. Yet the flood river water levels are difficult and challenging task that it cannot be easily captured with classical time-series approaches. This study proposed a novel intelligence system utilised various machine learning techniques as individual models, including radial basis function neural network (RBF-NN), adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), support vector machine (SVM), and long short-term memory network (LSTM) to establish intelligent committee machine learning flood forecasting (ICML-FF) framework. The combination of these individual models achieved through simple averaging method, and further optimised using weighted averaging by K-nearest neighbour (K-NN) and genetic algorithm (GA). The effectiveness of the proposed model was evaluated using real case study for Malaysia’s Kelantan River. The results show that ANFIS outperforms as individual model, while ICML-FF-based model produced better accuracy and lowest error than any one of the individuals. In general, it is found that the proposed ICML-FF is capable of robust forecasting model for flood early warning systems.