Particle swarm optimization training algorithm for ANNs in stage prediction of Shing Mun River

SummaryAn accurate water stage prediction allows the pertinent authority to issue a forewarning of the impending flood and to implement early evacuation measures when required. Existing methods including rainfall-runoff modeling or statistical techniques entail exogenous input together with a number of assumptions. The use of artificial neural networks (ANN) has been shown to be a cost-effective technique. But their training, usually with back-propagation algorithm or other gradient algorithms, is featured with certain drawbacks such as very slow convergence and easy entrapment in a local minimum. In this paper, a particle swarm optimization model is adopted to train perceptrons. The approach is applied to predict water levels in Shing Mun River of Hong Kong with different lead times on the basis of the upstream gauging stations or stage/time history at the specific station. It is shown that the PSO technique can act as an alternative training algorithm for ANNs.