Predicting longitudinal dispersion coefficient using ANN with metaheuristic training algorithms

A reliable prediction of dispersion coefficient can provide valuable information for environmental scientists and river engineers as well. The main objective of this study is to apply intelligence techniques for predicting longitudinal dispersion coefficient in rivers. In this regard, artificial neural network (ANN) models were developed. Four different metaheuristic algorithms including genetic algorithm (GA), imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA), bee algorithm (BA) and cuckoo search (CS) algorithm were employed to train the ANN models. The results obtained through the optimization algorithms were compared with the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm (conventional algorithm for training ANN). Overall, a relatively high correlation between measured and predicted values of dispersion coefficient was observed when the ANN models trained with the optimization algorithms. This study demonstrates that the metaheuristic algorithms can be successfully applied to make an improvement on the performance of the conventional ANN models. Also, the CS, ICA and BA algorithms remarkably outperform the GA and LM algorithms to train the ANN model. The results show superiority of the performance of the proposed model over the previous equations in terms of DR, R (2) and RMSE.