A Spatial-Reduction Attention-Based BiGRU Network for Water Level Prediction

According to the statistics of ship traffic accidents on inland waterways, potential safety hazards such as stranding, hitting rocks, and suspending navigation are on the increase because of the sudden rise and fall of the water level, which may result in fatalities, environmental devastation, and massive economic losses. In view of this situation, the purpose of this paper is to propose a high-accuracy water-level-prediction model based on the combination of the spatial-reduction attention and bidirectional gate recurrent unit (SRA-BiGRU), which provides support for ensuring the safe navigation of ships, guiding the reasonable stowage of ships, and flood prevention. The first contribution of this model is that it makes use of its strong fitting ability to capture nonlinear characteristics, and it fully considers the time series of water-level data. Secondly, the bidirectional recurrent neural network structure makes full use of past and future water-level information in the mapping process between input and output sequences. Thirdly, and most importantly, the introduction of spatial-reduction attention on the basis of BiGRU can not only automatically capture the correlations between the hidden vectors generated by BiGRU to address the issue of precision degradation due to the extended time span in water-level-forecasting tasks but can also make full use of the spatial information between water-level stations by emphasizing the influence of significant features on the prediction results. It is noteworthy that comparative experiments gradually prove the superiority of GRU, bidirectional recurrent neural network structure, and spatial-reduction attention, demonstrating that SRA-BiGRU is a water-level-prediction model with high availability, high accuracy, and high robustness.