“…Over the past decade, ML techniques have gained immense popularity in hydrology research. ML techniques have been successfully implemented for various hydrological applications for example flood modeling (Mosavi et al, 2018;Janizadeh et al, 2019) drought assessment (Feng et al, 2019;Shamshirband et al, 2020;Rhee and Im, 2017), water demand studies (Villarin and Rodriguez-Galiano, 2019;Xenochristou et al, 2021) rainfall modeling (Cramer et al, 2017;Basha et al, 2020), runoff modeling (Kumar et al, 2019;Tașar et al, 2019). Some of the ML models specifically used for rainfall-runoff modeling include ANN (Sudheer et al, 2002;Srinivasulu and Jain, 2006), adaptive neurofuzzy inference system or adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) (Nourani and Komasi, 2013;Talei et al, 2010), multivariate adaptive regression splines model (MARS) (Sharda et al, 2008) and M5 model tree (M5Tree) (Adnan et al, 2021;Nourani et al, 2019), support vector regression (SVR) (Hosseini and Mahjouri, 2016;Sedighi et al, 2016).…”