Modeling the effect of meteorological variables on streamflow estimation: application of data mining techniques in mixed rainfall–snowmelt regime Munzur River, Türkiye

Revealing the dynamic link between rainfall and runoff, which are the main components of the hydrological cycle, is significant for the planning and managing water resources, disaster risk management, and construction of water structures. This study used feed-forward neural network (FFNN), adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), and long short-term memory (LSTM) network to model the rainfall-runoff relationship. Various variations of lagged precipitation, temperature, relative humidity, and flows were presented as inputs, and the flow values of Munzur River were estimated as outputs. During the selection of input parameters, variables with high correlation to flow values were utilized. The model’s success was tested using several statistical indicators, including the coefficient of correlation (R), coefficient of determination (R2), and root mean square error (RMSE). When measuring values and model results are compared, FFNN and ANFIS models show accurate predictive results with high accuracy, while LSTM prediction results are not satisfactory. However, it was concluded that the FFNN model with the hyperbolic tangent sigmoid transfer function and Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm made a slightly more accurate estimation. In addition, it was revealed that the best ANFIS-Sugeno model was obtained with a hybrid learning algorithm, Gaussmf membership function, and eight subsets. As a result of the analysis, it has been found that FFNN is superior to ANFIS in flow prediction. These results provide policymakers and planners with helpful information for developing flood and drought management strategies. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.