Feasibility of neural network metamodels for emulation and sensitivity analysis of radionuclide transport models

In this paper we compare the outputs of neural network metamodels with numerical solutions of differential equation models in modeling cesium-137 transportation in sand. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were trained with differential equation simulation results. Training sets of various sizes (from 5120 to 163,840) were used. First order and total order Sobol methods were applied to both models in order to test the feasibility of neural network metamodels for sensitivity analysis of a radionuclide transport model. Convolutional neural networks were found to be capable of emulating the differential equation models with high accuracy when the training set size was 40,960 or higher. Neural network metamodels also gave similar results compared with the numerical solutions of the partial differential equation model in sensitivity analysis.