Application of augmented bat algorithm with artificial neural network in forecasting river inflow in Malaysia

Hydrologists rely extensively on anticipating river streamflow (SF) to monitor and regulate flood management and water demand for people. Only a few simulation systems, where previous techniques failed to anticipate SF data quickly, let alone cost-effectively, and took a long time to execute. The bat algorithm (BA), a meta-heuristic approach, was used in this study to optimize the weights and biases of the artificial neural network (ANN) model. The proposed hybrid work was validated in five different study areas in Malaysia. The statistical tests analysis of the preliminary results revealed that hybrid BA-ANN was superior to forecasting the SF at all five selected study areas, with average RMSE values of 0.103 m³/s for training and 0.143 m³/s for testing as compared to ANN standalone training and testing yielding 0.091 m³/s and 0.116 m³/s, respectively. This finding signifies that the implementation of BA into the ANN model resulted in a 20% improvement. In addition, with an <i>R</i>² score of 0.951, the proposed model showed a better correlation than the 0.937 value of <i>R</i>² of standard ANN. Nonetheless, while the proposed work outperformed the conventional ANN, the Taylor diagram, violin plot, relative error, and scatter plot findings confirmed the disparities in the proposed work’s performance throughout the research regions. The findings of these evaluations highlighted that the adaptability of the proposed works would need detailed investigation because its performance differed from case to case.