A comparative study on RBF and NARX based methods for forecasting of groundwater level

Abstract

Evaluation and forecasting of groundwater levels through time series model (s) helps for the sustainable development of groundwater resources. The focus of the present study is on the application of Radial Basis Function (RBF) and Non Linear auto-regressive with exogenous variable (NARX) data driven models to forecast groundwater level for multiple input scenario's and also multiple lead time. Weekly time series groundwater level data has been used as input and the models are developed to forecast one, two, three, four, five and sixth week ahead. Root mean square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (Cc) are used for evaluating the accuracy of the models. Based on the comparison of results, it was found that the RBF models are superior to the NARX models in forecasting groundwater level considering RMSE and Cc. The obtained result indicates that the RBF has high performance and consistent upto fourth week lead time and decaying performance for NARX models. Hence, RBF and NARX have the potential in forecasting groundwater level efficiently for multi step lead time. © 2011 CAFET-INNOVA TECHNICAL SOCIETY. All rights reserved.