Estuary water-stage forecasting by using radial basis function neural network

The Radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) has been successfully applied to many tasks due to its powerful properties in classification and functional approximation. This paper presents a novel RBFNN for water-stage forecasting in an estuary under high flood and tidal effects. The RBFNN adopts a hybrid two-stage learning scheme, unsupervised and supervised learning. In the first scheme, fuzzy min–max clustering is proposed for choosing best patterns for cluster representation in an efficient and automatic way. The second scheme uses supervised learning, which is a multivariate linear regression method to produce a weighted sum of the output from the hidden layer. Since this network has only one layer using a supervised learning algorithm, its training process is much faster than the error back propagation based multilayer perceptrons. Moreover, only one parameter, theta, must be determined manually. The other parameters used in this model can be adjusted automatically by model training. The water-stage data of the Tanshui River under tidal effect are used to construct a water-stage forecasting model that can also be used during flood. The results show that the RBFNN can be applied successfully and provide high accuracy and reliability of water-stage forecasting in an estuary.