Using an artificial neural network to model seasonal changes in beach profiles

An artificial neural network (ANN) was applied to predict seasonal beach profile evolution at various locations along the Tremadoc Bay, eastern Irish Sea. The beach profile variations in 19 stations for a period of about 7 years were studied using ANN. The model results were compared with field data. The most critical part of constructing ANN was the selection of minimum effective input data and the choice of proper activation function. Accordingly, some numerical techniques such as principal component analysis and correlation analysis were employed to detect the proper dataset. The geometric properties of the beach, wind data, local wave climate, and the corresponding beach level changes were fed to a feedforward backpropagation ANN. The performance of less than 0.0007 (mean square error) was achieved. The trained ANN model results had very good agreement with the beach profile surveys for the test data. Results of this study show that ANN can predict seasonal beach profile changes effectively, and the ANN results are generally more accurate when compared with computationally expensive mathematical model of the same study region. The ANN model results can be improved by the addition of more data, but the applicability of this method is limited to the range of the training data. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.