Medium- and long-term runoff forecasting based on a random forest regression model

Medium- and long-term runoff forecasting is closely related to the generation capacity forecasting of cascade hydropower stations, which is of great significance to power plants when arranging production plans and assisting market decisions. In order to improve the accuracy of runoff forecasting, an attempt was made to use random forest regression (RFR) to model the medium- and long-term runoff forecasting and to further make a verification based on the actual monthly runoff data of Mupo and Chuntangba stations. By comparison with the forecast results attained through a support vector machine (SVM) and an integrated autoregressive moving average model (IARMA), the results showed that the RFR model had the lowest mean square error (MSE) among the three methods. In addition, the coefficients of determination R-2 of the RFR for the two stations increased by 0.0261 and 0.0295 compared with the SVM model, and the R-2 rose by 0.1134 and 0.1332 compared with the IARMA model. The comparison of the three methods showed that the RFR had higher forecasting accuracy as well as stronger reliability and practicability than the IARMA model and the SVM model, so the RFR provided a new idea and method for the study of runoff forecasting.