Can machine learning and predictor selection algorithms yield

reliable stream flow prediction?

G M Kartick1; Suraj Jena2*; Jyotiprakash Padhi3; Deba Prakash Satapathy1
1
Department of Civil Engineering, Odisha University of Technology and Research, Kalinga Nagar,
Ghatikia, Bhubaneswar, Odisha 751003, India
2
School of Infrastructure, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, Odisha-752050, India
3
School of Civil Engineering, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha-751024, India

*Corresponding author: Suraj Jena, e-mail: sj13@iitbbs.ac.in

Abstract. Predicting stream flows with machine learning algorithms currently emerged as reliable
hydrological modeling because it reckons for the non-linearity involved and captures the complexity in
the historical dataset. But enhancing the prediction proficiencies of models is necessary for the greater
application of these machine learning-based streamflow prediction systems to watershed management.
This comprehensive study right from the selection of machine learning algorithms to optimal selection
of pertinent predictors. The algorithms adopted were Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector
Regression (SVR), M5Prime (M5P), Reduced Error Pruning Tree (REPTree), Random Tree (RT), and
Random Forest (RF) for daily time step prediction of stream flows. These six algorithms underwent
good to fitness criteria and RF outperformed other algorithms distinctly irrespective of the predictor
combination. This study frames a novel two-stage workflow to select pertinent predictors and to enhance
the proficiency of the model, lag studies were carried out for the daily temporal dataset predictors of
Rainfall and Potential Evapotranspiration to reduce the dimensionality of the model. The mean absolute
error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R 2), and Nash-Sutcliffe
efficiency (NSE) obtained on training and testing on model were 6.79, 2.96, 0.93, 0.90 and 11.39, 4.52,
0.89, 0.82 respectively. This framework also imparts flexibility for the generalized and robust
development of the model to acclimatize according to diverse study areas. Also, this could be a bright
step for enhancing watershed management for poorly or ungauged basins to predict stream flows of
daily time step with minimum efforts of data acquisition.
Keywords: Machine Learning, Predictor Selection, Streamflow prediction, Random Forest,
Hydrological Modeling.

1. Introduction
Over the years, streamflow prediction has gone through several methodological developments targeting
sustainable decision-making in water infrastructure planning and management. The co-existence of
floods and droughts poses a menace that cannot be eradicated but must be mitigated by robust
streamflow prediction systems to meet the various aggressive demands on a sustainable basis. Typically
streamflow prediction systems are categorized into physical-based and data-driven models (He et al.,
2014; Zhang et al., 2015; Kratzert et al., 2019). Each category has its strengths and weaknesses.
Physical-based models has its strength in integrating the process-driven complexities of hydrological
cycle taking conservation of mass, momentum and energy into consideration, which gives confidence
to the researchers in decision making (Toth & Brath, 2007; Zhang et al., 2015; Yang et al., 2020). The
physical-based models produce larger prediction uncertainty with the un-availability of comprehensive
required datasets indicating its weakness in conceptualizing the physical process with limited parameters
even though the dataset being a long-term time series. The afforested shortcoming of the physical based
model limits its transferability (Yadav et al., 2007; Parajka et al., 2013; Samaniego et al., 2017).
Whereas, machine learning (ML) algorithms are data-driven approach to draw inferences from patterns
in the data. ML models are known for their predictions of streamflow using historical data and their
capability emulate the high nonlinearity in natural processes (Toth & Brath, 2007; Yang et al., 2020;
Lin et al., 2021). However, the efficacy of these approaches largely depends on the quality of data, as
the data with measurement uncertainty may lower the reliability of the model.
From the literature review, it was observed that the dominant aspect of building a robust machine
learning model for streamflow prediction lies with the interpretability and its generalizability on fresh
data that has never been seen before. However, in the development and its performance testing phase,
ML models are prone to selecting irrelevant predictors leading to capturing noise while training, and
subsequently degrading the performance of the model due to an increase in the dimensionality of the
training dataset (Raschka, 2020; Gharib & Davies, 2021).
This study proposes a two-stage framework in the model training and testing phases to avert the glitches
mentioned in the earlier paragraph. From the literature, it was observed that very limited prediction
models have been developed for agriculture-dominated tropical watersheds. The primitive objectives of
this study are: (1) To examine the level of uncertainties and hindrances about the input predictor batch
and algorithms for agriculture-dominated tropical watersheds and to avert the pitfalls mentioned above
by specific preprocessing workflow; (2) to select the optimal hierarchal predictor batch through a hybrid
selection algorithm; and (3) to develop a machine learning-based model for daily streamflow prediction
using novel data-mining algorithm. The regression algorithms used in this study are multi-layer
perceptron (ANN), support vector regression (SVR), model5 prime (M5P), reduced error pruning tree
(REPTree), random tree (RT), and random forest (RF), being standalone and seldomly applied in
prediction of streamflow.

2. Methodology
This section discusses the essential descriptions of the study area, descriptive statistics on data used,
estimation of potential evapotranspiration, the model framework involving the selection of a machine
learning algorithm, predictor selection algorithm, evaluation of model performance using good-to-fit
criteria and model development.
2.1 Study Area
The study area, the Rana watershed, is in the lower-middle reach of the Mahanadi River basin in the
state of Odisha, India. The Rana watershed extends from 20.11˚ N to 20.41˚ N and from 85.39˚ E to
85.63˚ E, bounded by hills to the east and west, and the Mahanadi River to the north side. The total
drainage area of the watershed is 496 km2 with the longest flow path of this watershed being 25 km,
approximately. Topographically, this watershed slopes moderately (up to 8%) from south to north, with
a greater slope of approximately 22% with hillocks and drainage channels in lateritic uplands (Jena et
al., 2021). Average annual rainfall of approximately 1451 mm, out of which 70% is received from July
to October (Jena, et al., 2020).
2.2 Data
Soil textural information was obtained from (Jena et al., 2021) and found that 5 USDA soil classes exist
in the study area with the majority of the soil identified as sandy loam (40.9 %) followed by loam (30.9
%), silty loam (19 %), silty clay loam (8.8 %) and sand (0.4 %). Land use/land cover (LULC) data for
the year 2002 of scale 1: 50000 was collected from Odisha Space Application Centre (ORSAC) and
considered in the model from the year 1997 to 2002. Subsequently, LULC in raster format with pixel
size 53 m × 53 m for the years 2005, 2010, and 2015 were collected from NRSC, ISRO, Government of
India, Hyderabad, India and were considered for durations of 2003 to 2005, 2006 to 2010 and 2013 to
2016, respectively. The LULC classes found in the Rana watershed are dense forest, shrub forest,
agricultural land, wasteland, water bodies, and built–up areas.
The digital elevation model (DEM) of the watershed was extracted from the Earthdata, Advanced
Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data with a grid size of 30 m × 30
m. The slope map was generated and classified into 5 subgroups of range 0% – 5.04%, 5.04% – 9.62%,
9.62% – 16.81%, 16% – 33.74%, and 33.74% – 140.75%. Data processing and management exercises
of soil, LULC, and DEM were carried out using ArcGIS 10.2. The streamflow data at the outlet was
monitored daily between 2014 to 2016 and additionally, the measurements for the duration between
1997 to 2014 were collected from Central Water Commission, India. The daily meteorological
parameters namely maximum and minimum temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, solar radiation,
and rainfall were obtained from an automatic weather station (AWS) installed in the study watershed.
2.3 Estimation of Potential Evapotranspiration
There are several empirical methods for potential evapotranspiration (PET) determination vary
depending on the input parameter requirement, i.e., from simple temperature-driven to energy supply &
vapor transport approaches. The findings of (Ellenburg et al., 2018) presented that the significance of
PET over streamflow modeling in daily time through Penman-Monteith Equations (Penman monteith,
1963) produces a more accurate streamflow prediction compared to other empirical methods. So, for
this study the PET was computed using the FAO Penman-Monteith method using AWS data (Rao et al.,
2012)(Cai et al., 2007).
2.4 Machine Learning Algorithms
The streamflow prediction proficiencies of machine learning algorithms were enhanced using the two-
fold framework proposed in this study .The Weka 3.8.6 (Khosravi et al., 2021) and python environment
(Abbas et al., 2022) was used to implement six heuristic data mining algorithms namely, ANN, SVR,
M5Prime, REPTree, Random Tree (RT), and RF in this study. ANN uses backpropagation to learn a
multi-layer perceptron. The hyper-parameters determined using a grid-search algorithm with cross-
validation and pruning were carried out with respect to the number of neurons in the hidden layers,
learning rate, momentum, and the sigmoid activation function for ANN. Support vector machines uses
sequential minimal optimization for regression (SMO-reg) and its performance gets enhanced by
selecting the RBF kernel which can grasp the non-linearity aspect since after normalization it can be
mapped to a high dimensional space. Hyperparameters involved are “c” and “gamma” which checks
misrepresenting points and decision boundaries (He et al., 2014 ).
The M5Prime algorithm is a reconstruction of the M5 algorithm for inducing trees of regression models
(Quinlan, 1992). It uses a divergence metric called “Standard Deviation Reduction” for producing a
decision-based regression tree. Later the algorithm is followed by pruning and smoothening to cater to
decreased error estimates and to compensate for the acute discontinuity that appears obligatory between
adjacent linear sets at the leaves of pruned tree. Hyperparameters involved were maximum depth, the
minimum number of leaves, and a certain smoothing constant for this study (Pal & Deswal, 2009;
Ghasemi et al., 2018; Adnan et al., 2019). The Reduced Error Pruned Tree is a fast decision tree learner,
it works on information gain or reducing the variance as splitting criteria and it does prune based on the
mean square error on the predictions made by the tree. The process is recursively repeated to interpret
and prune the tree by contemplating it against already established trees. This process were repeated for
several specific depths of the trees to ensure stopping criteria (Joseph K & Ravichandran, 2012; Chen
et al., 2019).
A random tree constructs a tree that considers randomly chosen attributes at each node. It does not prune
and only allows the estimation of class probabilities based on a hold-out set (Xu et al., 2019). The RF
constructs a forest of random trees i.e., an ensembled method of the decision tree. It combines the two
operations. Firstly, make the array of all the recommended places (bootstrapping) which ensure different
size and combination of attributes. Secondly, do the voting process to select the best place (aggregation).
The whole process of getting the recommendation and selecting the best place is generalized as a
bagging process. Hyperparameters involved are maximum depth and number of estimators which ensure
a certain kind of stopping criteria to select the best set of attributes and also have the capability to
compute the importance of each attribute contributing to the target attribute (Oppel & Schumann, 2020;
Hagen et al., 2021).
2.5 Model Performance Evaluation

To evaluate a generalizable model at a new instance, a data partitioning strategy called k-fold cross-
validation technique is carried out, where k = 10 (tenfold cross-validation), but such an estimate is biased
since the model is exposed to a testing set, which eventually guides the algorithm, model
hyperparameters, etc. (Gharib & Davies, 2021). Hence this cross-validation technique only applied for
the training set (1997- 2012) and comparison of several algorithms. The evaluation criteria to compare
algorithms and measure the prediction skill of the model with an unseen dataset were mean absolute
error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R2), and Nash-Sutcliffe
efficiency (NSE: Nash & Sutcliffe, 1970). The expressions for MAE, RMSE, R2, and NSE are

1 𝑁
𝑀𝐴𝐸 = ∑ |ℎ − ℎ𝑜𝑖 | (1)
𝑁 𝑖=1 𝑠𝑖

∑𝑁
𝑖=1(ℎ𝑠𝑖 −ℎ𝑜𝑖 )
2
𝑅𝑀𝑆𝐸 = √ (2)
𝑁

2
(∑𝑁 ̅̅̅̅ ̅̅̅
𝑖=1(ℎ𝑜𝑖 −ℎ𝑜 )(ℎ𝑠𝑖 −ℎ𝑠 ))
𝑅2 = 𝑁 ̅̅̅̅
∑𝑖=1(ℎ𝑜𝑖 −ℎ 2 𝑁 ̅̅̅𝑠 )2 (3)
𝑜 ) ∑𝑖=1(ℎ𝑠𝑖 −ℎ

∑𝑁 (ℎ −ℎ )2
𝑜𝑖 𝑠𝑖
𝑁𝑆𝐸 = 1 − ∑𝑖=1
𝑁 (ℎ −ℎ̅̅̅̅)2 (4)
𝑖=1 𝑜𝑖 𝑜

where hoi is the observed streamflow discharge at test locations; hsi is the predicted streamflow discharge
obtained from the model algorithm; ̅̅̅
ℎ0 is the mean of observed streamflow discharge; ̅̅̅ ℎ𝑠 is the mean
of predicted streamflow discharge; N is the number of observations. A best fit between the observed and
predicted streamflow discharge under ideal conditions would yield an MAE and RMSE value equal to
zero, whereas R2 and NSE value equal to one. Moreover, NSE values between 0.0 and 1.0 are generally
viewed as acceptable performance levels.
2.6 Hierarchical Predictor Selection Algorithm
In building models, the key to enhancing the skill of prediction is to select the most appropriate/ pertinent
predictors from the entire predictors. Selecting the entire predictor sometimes may incur overfitting with
flawed prediction due to the existence of noisy and irrelevant data. Hence a new two-stage technique
was framed for the predictor selection. To avoid such pitfalls standard techniques were employed by the
researchers namely filter, wrapper, and embedded methods (Lin et al., 2014; Rodriguez-Galiano et al.,
2018; Jena et al., 2021). In this study, we followed the workflow for the predictor selection which help
us build a more generalized model. Initially, in stage one, several HIDs were developed by the forward
selection or backward elimination of predictors under the wrapper method, which explores a whole lot
of combinations of static, spatial, and temporal predictors (Table 1). The performance of algorithms on
different HIDs was evaluated using RMSE, MAE, R2, and NSE using 10-fold cross-validation. These
HIDs were later partitioned into groups that can be interpreted as ‘good’, ‘moderate’, and ‘poor’ using
a k- means clustering algorithm based on each HID performance (Solomatine & Shrestha, 2009; Jena et
al., 2021). Subsequently, the embedded method was used for ranking the predictors for all ‘good’
clustered HIDs by assigning importance, calculated based on mean decrease impurity (Louppe et al.,
2013), which has shown practical utility and dominant experimental studies. For each HIDs ranking of
predictors is done numerically. Consequently, predictors were being accrued at different ranks in all the
“good” clustered HIDs using the following equation (Breiman, 2001; Louppe et al., 2013)
The predictors were ranked from 1st to nth where “n” was the number of predictors in a particular HID.
A rank frequency matrix is deployed for the investigation of each predictor attracting several times to
its corresponding rank. Here, we adopted the hybrid wrapper-embedded predictor selection algorithm
to select the optimal number of relevant predictors named ‘HID-P’ which enhances the prediction skill
of the model (Jena et al., 2021).
The predictor selection criteria for stage 1 were
(a) The predictors having higher frequencies to accrue the ranks between first and fifth to be selected
(b) Predictors possessing ≥50% of the total instances of appearance in ‘good’ HIDs within first to fifth
rank to be selected as the appropriate predictor.
 Table 1 Predictor Set Hierarchies for stage-1

Hierarchies Predictors Hierarchies Predictors

HID - 1 Land use, Soil, Slope, PET, Rainfall HID - 16 PET, Rainfall
HID - 2 Soil, Slope, PET, Rainfall HID - 17 Land use, Rainfall
HID - 3 Land use, Slope, PET, Rainfall HID - 18 Land use, Soil
HID - 4 Land use, Soil, PET, Rainfall HID - 19 Soil, Rainfall
HID - 5 Land use, Soil, Slope, Rainfall HID - 20 Slope, Rainfall
HID - 6 Land use, Soil, Slope, PET HID - 21 Soil, Slope
HID - 7 Slope, PET, Rainfall HID - 22 Land use, PET
HID - 8 Land use, PET, Rainfall HID - 23 Soil, PET
HID - 9 Land use, Soil, Rainfall HID - 24 Slope, PET
HID - 10 Land use, Soil, Slope HID - 25 Land use, Slope
HID - 11 Soil, PET, Rainfall HID - 26 Rainfall
HID - 12 Soil, Slope, PET HID - 27 PET
HID - 13 Land use, Slope, PET HID - 28 Slope
HID - 14 Soil, Slope, Rainfall HID - 29 Soil
HID - 15 Land use, Soil, PET HID - 30 Land use
The second stage of this framework comprises conducting a lag analysis of only daily time step datasets
i.e., rainfall, potential evapotranspiration, and discharge time-series data. Since there is always a lag
associated with the time elapsed between rainfall event and runoff. Only two lags were adopted in the
model development (Table 2). Such process accustoms to the lag and storage characteristics of the
watershed. Here in this stage, the same hybrid wrapper-embedded technique with rank frequency matrix
as in stage one is deployed for predictor selection of lag-associated datasets.
Table 2 Predictor set hierarchies for Stage 2

Hierarchies Predictors Hierarchies Predictors

HID – I Pt, Pt-1, Pt-2, PETt, PETt-1, PETt-2 HID - VI Pt-1, Pt-2, PETt
HID - II Pt, Pt-1, Pt-2, PETt, PETt-1 HID - VII Pt-1, PETt, PETt-1 PETt-2
HID - III Pt, Pt-1, Pt-2, PETt HID - VIII Pt-1, PETt, PETt-1
HID - IV Pt-1, Pt-2, PETt, PETt-1, PETt-2 HID -IX Pt-1, PETt
HID - V Pt-1, Pt-2, PETt, PETt-1
Note: ‘t’ is in days.
The predictor selection criteria for Stage 2 component were
(a) the predictors having higher frequencies to accrue the ranks between first and third to be selected
(b) predictors possessing ≥50% of the total instances of appearance in first to third rank to be selected
as the appropriate predictor.
Moreover, the lagged streamflow was also included in the predictor set considering the PACF (Partial
Auto Correlation Factor) analysis (He et al., 2014). Further, the pertinent predictors determined through
both stages (HID-SPP: supreme pertinent predictors) were used for model training and testing.

3. Results and Discussion

3.1 Selection of Algorithm
Exhaustive combinations of predictors were considered in the form of different hierarchies (HID: Table
1). Each HIDs were investigated with 6 algorithms, namely ANN, SVR, M5P, REPTree, RT, and RF
for generalizable model development through a ten-fold cross-validation technique (Section 2.5). The
performance and consistency of RF throughout all the HIDs were outperforming the other algorithms
under consideration. The second better algorithm was REP Tree, with very lean differences in the values
of RMSE, but significant differences existed with MAE, R2, and NSE values. Hence, for the
development of the streamflow prediction model, the RF algorithm was adopted. The significance of
each predictor and its influence on either inclusion or exclusion is discussed in the next section.
3.2 Predictor Selection
As discussed in the methodology the wrapper method was used for evaluating all the 30 HIDs. Based
on the performance metrics values the HIDs were clustered into three clusters “good”, “moderate” and
“poor” HIDs using the k-means clustering algorithm with k=3 resulting in 16, 7, 7 “good”, “moderate”
and “poor” HIDs, respectively. The “good” HIDs were used for further analysis and through
investigating the metrics values in the good HIDs, it was observed that there was a scope for improving
the values through the methodologies described under the wrapper method (section 2.6) targeting
generalizable prediction model development.
The feasible way ahead was the selection of predictors based on their significance towards the model
training and avoiding redundant predictors by using the embedded technique. Here the importance or
rank of all predictors in “good” HIDs was computed using MDI (mean decrease impurity).
Table (4) Frequency of different predictors to accrue ranks from 1st to 25th in all 16 good HIDs.

Note: The graduated green to yellow shades represents the magnitude of frequencies to accrue
different ranks.
The eight pertinent predictors selected through above-discussed method in Stage 1 were PET; LULC:
Built-up area, agricultural land, dense forest, shrub forest, wasteland, water bodies; and rainfall, which
had a frequency ranking within the first five (Table 3). The sum of the instances each selected predictor
appeared within rank fifth was more than or equal to 50% of the total number of times it appeared in 16
“good” HIDs. For instance, PET was selected as it possessed higher frequencies i.e., 8, 1, 1, 0, and 1 to
accrue ranks below five, and it has appeared 11 times out of a total of 16 appearances (greater than 50%)
in good clustered HIDs. But Loam having frequencies 1, 1, 1 acquired rank third, fourth and fifth
respectively which satisfied criteria 1. However, this predictor failed to satisfy criteria 2 because of only
three out of a total of 8 appearances which is 37.5% of the times it appeared within the fifth rank.
Similarly, all the 25 predictors are implemented decisively, and eight predictions were selected as HID-
P in stage 1. But, the performance metrics MAE, RMSE, R2, and NSE are in a range of (6.6-7.9), (18.5-
19.9), (0.24-0.34), and (0.23-0.33), respectively. Hence there is a scope for enhancing the model
performance efficacy through further analysis in Stage 2 as described in Section 2.6.
Table 4 Frequency of different predictors to accrue ranks from 1st to 6th in all HIDs.

Rank Frequency Matrix for Lag Studies

1 2 3 4 5 6 Total
P(t-2) 5 1 0 0 0 0 6
P(t-1) 4 4 1 0 0 0 9
PET(t-1) 0 3 3 0 0 0 6
P(t) 0 0 1 2 0 0 3
PET(t) 0 1 2 4 2 0 9
PET(t-2) 0 0 1 0 1 1 3
Note: The graduated green shades represent the magnitude of frequencies to accrue different ranks.
Predictors with blue-colored cells were included in the pertinent predictors of Stage 2.
The Stage 2 predictor section studies the lag associated with the daily time step datasets of rainfall, PET,
and streamflow. Table 2 shows the considered combinations and created hierarchies of nine Stage 2
HIDs. The hybrid wrapper-embedded technique and rank frequency matrix were applied as same as in
Stage 1. The predictor selection criteria for Stage 2 depict, three predictors selected were rainfall
considering 2-day lags (Pt-1 & Pt-2) and PET considering one day lag (PETt-1) which had a frequency
ranking below three. The sum of the instances each selected predictor appeared within rank three was
more than or equal to 50% of the total number of times it appeared. Further, the partial auto-correlation
factor (PACF) is computed in a python environment importing ‘plot_pacf’ from
‘statsmodels.graphics.tsaplots’ package. Figure 6 shows the first lag shows the significant and
outstanding correlation in a time series analysis of a target variable resembling the first lagged
streamflow can enhance the prediction. Henceforward, three predictors, rainfall with two-day lags (Pt-2
& Pt-1), PET with one-day lag (PETt-1), and streamflow with one-day lag (Qt-1) will be included in HID-
P of Stage 1 to become HID-SPP as supreme pertinent predictors after two-stage analysis.
3.1 Model Development
The supreme pertinent predictors, HID – SPP, after two-stage analysis were six LULC classes (Built-up
areas, Agricultural Land, Dense Forest, Shrub Forest, Waste Land & Waterbodies), Pt-2, Pt-1, PETt-1, and
Qt-1. Subsequently, the observed daily streamflows of 16 years (1997-2012) were used for the training
of the RF algorithm. The predicted streamflows obtained during training corresponding to observed
streamflow were further analyzed for evaluating the performance of the model training. The RMSE,
MAE, R2, and NSE were found to be 6.79, 2.96, 0.93, and 0.90 respectively.
The scatter plot shown in Figure 1 depicts that the model has trained with higher accuracy for the
streamflow values greater than 2 m3/sec and slight discrepancies for the values smaller than 2 m3/sec.
The performance metrics values mentioned above showed a superior overall accuracy of model training.
The trained model was named “RF-Stream”. Subsequently, the “RF-Stream” was tested using the testing
streamflow dataset of 4 years (2013-2016) and the supreme pertinent predictors for model efficiency.
Results obtained for RMSE, MAE, R2, and NSE were found to be 11.39, 4.52, 0.89, and 0.82,
respectively.
It was evident from the scatter plots of the training and testing of “RF-Stream” that the streamflow
prediction model was successively developed and has produced reliably accurate streamflow prediction
with the test dataset. The “RF-Stream” was trained and tested using a reasonably large dataset with a
wide range of inherent variability in predictors, which supports its generalizable application in ungauged
or partially gauged basins. It needs further evaluation with predictors from varying climatic and
hydrological settings to be proclaimed as a generalizable streamflow prediction model. The current
version may be a suitable alternative tool to cumbersome physical-based models for scientists with
similar hydrological conditions with agricultural-dominated watersheds by acquiring easily available
spatio-temporal satellite and meteorological parameters. The framework developed can be adapted
globally for making streamflow prediction accurate and cost-effective.

Figure 1 Scatter plot on log scale depicting the correctness of model training and testing. Green lines
and blue lines representing confidence and prediction band. And, orange and red line represent linear
fit and 1:1 slope line
3.2 Conclusion
In this study, 20 years (1997-2016) of hydrometeorological data consisting meteorological, streamflow,
DEM, and Land use data is used development of streamflow prediction model for the Rana basin. The
supreme pertinent predictors were finalized specific to this study area are based on a proposed workflow.
This study also addressed the lag associated studies with the hydrological system. The major findings
from this study can be summarized that (i) Bagging based Ensemble model Random Forest outperforms
among other benchmark machine learning models with significant differences mapped using heatmaps
and differences between random forest and random tree clearly show the effect of inclusion or its
exclusion of pruning in regression trees respectively. (ii) Rank frequency matrix ascertains the
dominance of predictor with other predictors. For instance, rainfall of two and one-day lag over the
watershed is proved to be more effective for predicting daily streamflow than the rainfall on the day of
prediction alone. Similarly, PET of first lag over the watershed is of greater importance than the PET
on the day of prediction and second lag of PET which makes sense of clear framing of modelling the
hydrological aspect including delay/lag associated with the rainfall and PET in the contribution towards
streamflow. (iii) LULC changes over the study area were found to be a major lead next to rainfall, PET.
The model identified the accustoms according to its dynamics involved in temporal changes which
improved the required skill of prediction to grab the patterns.
This comprehensive two-stage framework approach could be big leap towards optimal selection of
predictors and prediction systems of daily time step streamflow with no complex data acquisition, with
simply acquiring satellite temporal images for land use dynamics from authorities and installations of
automatic weather station in few nearby basins which has capability to sense solar insolation for
attaining time-series PET based on net radiation. Such station also assists in monitoring, understanding
and strategize the adaptation of climate change and synthesis of these data in forecasting the streamflow
is the future course of the research. Conclusively, this framework could be bright step for enhancing
watershed management for poorly gauged basins or ungauged basins mostly in developing countries to
predict streamflow of daily time step with minimum efforts of data acquisition which ultimately
legitimates the ecological balance in the watershed with comprehensive planning and conservation of
land and water resources.
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