Suspended sediment load prediction using long short-term memory neural network

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 7826 - 22
• Main Authors: AlDahoul, Nouar, Essam, Yusuf, Kumar, Pavitra, Ahmed, Ali Najah, Sherif, Mohsen, Sefelnasr, Ahmed, Elshafie, Ahmed
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 09-04-2021; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/166; 704/242; Environmental health; Environmental impact; Humanities and Social Sciences; Hydraulic structures; Long short-term memory; multidisciplinary; Neural networks; Predictions; Regression analysis; Rivers; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Sediment concentration; Sediment load; Sediments; Short term; Suspended load; Suspended sediments
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-87415-4

Rivers carry suspended sediments along with their flow. These sediments deposit at different places depending on the discharge and course of the river. However, the deposition of these sediments impacts environmental health, agricultural activities, and portable water sources. Deposition of suspended sediments reduces the flow area, thus affecting the movement of aquatic lives and ultimately leading to the change of river course. Thus, the data of suspended sediments and their variation is crucial information for various authorities. Various authorities require the forecasted data of suspended sediments in the river to operate various hydraulic structures properly. Usually, the prediction of suspended sediment concentration (SSC) is challenging due to various factors, including site-related data, site-related modelling, lack of multiple observed factors used for prediction, and pattern complexity.Therefore, to address previous problems, this study proposes a Long Short Term Memory model to predict suspended sediments in Malaysia's Johor River utilizing only one observed factor, including discharge data. The data was collected for the period of 1988–1998. Four different models were tested, in this study, for the prediction of suspended sediments, which are: ElasticNet Linear Regression (L.R.), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network, Extreme Gradient Boosting, and Long Short-Term Memory. Predictions were analysed based on four different scenarios such as daily, weekly, 10-daily, and monthly. Performance evaluation stated that Long Short-Term Memory outperformed other models with the regression values of 92.01%, 96.56%, 96.71%, and 99.45% daily, weekly, 10-days, and monthly scenarios, respectively.