ON THE EVALUATION OF THE GRADIENT TREE BOOSTING MODEL FOR GROUNDWATER LEVEL FORECASTING

Abstract

Though groundwater is a replenishable resource, it’s over exploitation has posed greater problem of its depletion. Hence, monitoring and forecasting of groundwater levels has become a primary task of governmental water boards/agencies for sustainable water management. The current study focused on evaluating the performance of Gradient Tree Boosting (GTB) model with that of conventional Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) models in forecasting groundwater levels of two coastal aquifers. Data of two groundwater level monitoring wells penetrating into unconfined aquifers located at Shirtadi and Rayee near to Mangalore city of Karnataka state, India was considered in the present study. Monthly groundwater level data of the years 2000 – 2013 were used for model simulation; wherein 70% of data was used for model training and the remaining 30% served as testing data. Comparative result evaluation shows that the proposed GTB approach for one month ahead groundwater level forecasting was giving much accurate results than the other models for the same period of time and same set of data. For Rayee monitoring well, the error statistic, RRMSE of GTB, GMDH and ANFIS models obtained during test phase were 0.473, 0.517 and 0.7522, respectively. The comparison is examined further with different performance metrics.