A compound approach for ten-day runoff prediction by coupling wavelet denoising, attention mechanism, and LSTM based on GPU parallel acceleration technology

Abstract

Deep learning models have a high application value in runoff forecasting, but their prediction mechanism is difficult to interpret and their computational cost is high when dealing with complex hydrological relationships, limiting their feasibility in hydrological process mechanism analysis. To address these concerns, the paper first introduces an attention mechanism (AM) for building a long short-term memory network (LSTM) model with AM in the hidden layer (AM-LSTM). The AM-LSTM model employs attention layers to improve information extraction from hidden layers, resulting in a more accurate representation of the relationships between runoff-related elements. Furthermore, in the hidden layers of the AM-LSTM model, interpretable spatiotemporal attention units are established, which not only improves the model's prediction accuracy but also provides interpretability to the forecasting process. Furthermore, parallelization techniques are used in the paper to address the issue of model runtime cost. Simultaneously, to address the accuracy degradation caused by parallelization, the paper employs wavelet denoising (WD) techniques and builds the WD-AM-LSTM model. This accomplishment enables the runoff forecasting model to predict runoff in real time and with high accuracy. Based on validation using ten-day runoff data from the Huanren Reservoir in the Hun River's middle reaches, the results show that, with two layers and an eight-batch size, the AM-LSTM model outperforms the LSTM model in capturing spatiotemporal runoff features. During the model testing phase, the AM-LSTM model improves the MAE, RMSE, and NSE performance metrics by 8.46%, 13%, and 3.82%, respectively. The WD-AM-LSTM model effectively mitigates the noise impact caused by data parallelization under the conditions of two layers and a batch size of 512, achieving the same level of prediction performance while reducing computational cost by 92.01%. By incorporating attention mechanisms and wavelet denoising techniques, this study obtains high-speed and accurate predictions with interpretable results. It expands the deep learning models' applicability in ten-day runoff forecasting work.