comparison between multi-layer perceptron and radial basis function networks for sediment load estimation in a tropical watershed比较多层感知器和径向基函数网络的输沙量估计热带分水岭.pdfVIP

Journal of Water Resource and Protection, 2012, 4, 870-876 /10.4236/jwarp.2012.410102 Published Online October 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jwarp) Comparison between Multi-Layer Perceptron and Radial Basis Function Networks for Sediment Load Estimation in a Tropical Watershed 1 2* Hadi Memarian , Siva Kumar Balasundram 1Department of Land Management, Faculty of Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia 2Department of Agriculture Technology, Faculty of Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia * Email: siva@.my Received August 21, 2012; revised September 20, 2012; accepted October 19, 2012 ABSTRACT Prediction of highly non-linear behavior of suspended sediment flow in rivers has prime importance in environmental studies and watershed management. In this study, the predictive performance of two Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), namely Radial Basis Function (RBF) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) were compared. Time series data of daily suspended sediment discharge and water discharge at the Langat River, Malaysia were used for training and testing the networks. Mean Square Error (MSE), Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE) and correlation coefficient (r) were used for performance evaluation of the models. Using the testing data set, both models produced a similar level of robustness in sediment load simulation. The MLP network model showed a slightly better output than the RBF network model in predicting suspended sediment discharge, especially in the training process. However, both ANNs showed a weak ro- bustness in estimati