Design of Deep Belief Networks for Short‐Term Prediction of Drought Index Using Data in the Huaihe River Basin

With the global climate change, drought disasters occur frequently. Drought prediction is an important content for drought disaster management, planning and management of water resource systems of a river basin. In this study, a short‐term drought prediction model based on deep belief networks (DBNs) is proposed to predict the time series of different time‐scale standardized precipitation index (SPI). The DBN model is applied to predict the drought time series in the Huaihe River Basin, China. Compared with BP neural network, the DBN‐based drought prediction model has shown better predictive skills than the BP neural network for the different time‐scale SPI. This research can improve drought prediction technology and be helpful for water resources managers and decision makers in managing drought disasters.