A comparison of artificial neural networks for prediction of suspended sediment discharge in river - A case study in Malaysia

Prediction of highly non linear behavior of suspended
sediment flow in rivers has prime importance in the field of water resources engineering. In this study the predictive performance of two Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) namely, the Radial Basis Function (RBF) Network and the Multi Layer Feed Forward (MLFF) Network have been compared. Time series data of daily suspended sediment discharge and water discharge at Pari River was used for
training and testing the networks. A number of statistical parameters i.e. root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), coefficient of efficiency (CE) and coefficient of determination (R2) were used for performance evaluation of the models. Both the models produced satisfactory results and showed a good agreement between
the predicted and observed data. The RBF network model provided slightly better results than the MLFF network model in predicting suspended sediment discharge.