Deep Feature Learning Architectures for Daily Reservoir Inflow Forecasting

Inflow forecasting applies data supports for the operations and managements of reservoirs. To better accommodate the sophisticated characteristics of the daily reservoir inflow, two deep feature learning architectures, i.e., deep restricted Boltzmann machine (DRBM) and stack Autoencoder (SAE), respectively, are introduced in this paper. This study sheds light on the application of deep learning architectures for daily reservoir inflow forecasting, which has been attracting much attention in various areas for its ability to extract and learn useful features from a large number of data. Evaluations are made comparing the basic feed forward neural network (FFNN), the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), and two categories deep neural networks (DNNs) constructed by the integrations the FFNN with two deep feature learning architectures, named DRBM-based NN and stack SAE-based NN, respectively. Two daily inflow series of the Three Gorges reservoir (1/1/2000-31/12/2014) and the Gezhouba reservoir (1/1/1992-31/12/2014), China, are applied for four modeling exercises, respectively. The results show that, the two DNN models overwhelm the FFNN and the ARIMA models in terms of mean absolute percentage error, normalized root-mean-square error, and threshold statistic criteria.