Generalized regression neural network in modelling river sediment yield

The majority of the artificial neural network applications in water resources involve the employment of feed forward back propagation method (FFBP). In this study another ANN algorithm, generalized regression neural network, GRNN, was used in river suspended sediment estimation. Generalized regression neural network does not require an iterative training procedure as in back propagation method. The GRNN simulations do not face the frequently encountered local minima problem in FFBP applications and GRNN does not generate estimates physically not plausible. The neural networks are trained using daily river flow and suspended sediment data belonging to Juniata Catchment in USA. The suspended sediment estimations provided by two ANN algorithms are compared with conventional sediment rating curve and multi linear regression method results. The mean squared error and the determination coefficient are used as comparison criteria. Also the estimated and observed sediment sums are examined in addition to two previously mentioned performance criteria. The ANN estimations are found significantly superior to conventional method results. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.