Comparative study of monthly inflow prediction methods for the Three Gorges Reservoir

Due to the complexity of influencing factors and the limitation of existing scientific knowledge, current monthly inflow prediction accuracy is unable to meet the requirements of various water users yet. A flow time series is usually considered as a combination of quasi-periodic signals contaminated by noise, so prediction accuracy can be improved by data preprocess. Singular spectrum analysis (SSA), as an efficient preprocessing method, is used to decompose the original inflow series into filtered series and noises. Current application of SSA only selects filtered series as model input without considering noises. This paper attempts to prove that noise may contain hydrological information and it cannot be ignored, a new method that considerers both filtered and noises series is proposed. Support vector machine (SVM), genetic programming (GP), and seasonal autoregressive (SAR) are chosen as the prediction models. Four criteria are selected to evaluate the prediction model performance: Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency, Water Balance efficiency, relative error of annual average maximum (REmax) monthly flow and relative error of annual average minimum (REmin) monthly flow. The monthly inflow data of Three Gorges Reservoir is analyzed as a case study. Main results are as following: (1) coupling with the SSA, the performance of the SVM and GP models experience a significant increase in predicting the inflow series. However, there is no significant positive change in the performance of SAR (1) models. (2) After considering noises, both modified SSA-SVM and modified SSA-GP models perform better than SSA-SVM and SSA-GP models. Results of this study indicated that the data preprocess method SSA can significantly improve prediction precision of SVM and GP models, and also proved that noises series still contains some information and has an important influence on model performance.