Suspended sediment load prediction modelling based on artificial intelligence methods: The tropical region as a case study

The impact of the suspended sediment load (SSL) on environmental health, agricultural operations, and water resources planning, is significant. The deposit of SSL restricts the streamflow region, affecting aquatic life migration and finally causing a river course shift. As a result, data on suspended sediments and their fluctuations are essential for a number of authorities especially for water resources decision makers. SSL prediction is often difficult due to a number of issues such as site-specific data, site-specific models, lack of several substantial components to use in prediction, and complexity its pattern. In the past two decades, many machine learning algorithms have shown huge potential for SSL river prediction. However, these models did not provide very reliable results, which led to the conclusion that the accuracy of SSL prediction should be improved. As a result, in order to solve past concerns, this research proposes a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for SSL prediction. The proposed model was applied for SSL prediction in Johor River located in Malaysia. The study allocated data for suspended sediment load and river flow for period 2010 to 2020. In the current research, four alternative models—Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network, Support Vector Regression (SVR), Random Forest (RF), and Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) were investigated to predict the suspended sediment load. The proposed model attained a high correlation value between predicted and actual SSL (0.97), with a minimum RMSE (148.4 ton/day and a minimum MAE (33.43 ton/day). and can thus be generalized for application in similar rivers around the world.