M5 Model Trees and Neural Networks: Application to Flood Forecasting in the Upper Reach of the Huai River in China

The applicability and performance of the so-called M5 model tree machine learning technique is investigated in a flood forecasting problem for the upper reach of the Huai River in China. In one of configurations this technique is compared to multilayer perceptron artificial neural network (ANN). It is shown that model trees, being analogous to piecewise linear functions, have certain advantages compared to ANNs—they are more transparent and hence acceptable by decision makers, are very fast in training and always converge. The accuracy of M5 trees is similar to that of ANNs. The improved accuracy in predicting high floods was achieved by building a modular model (mixture of models); in it the flood samples with special hydrological characteristics are split into groups for which separate M5 and ANN models are built. The hybrid model combining model tree and ANN gives the best prediction result.