Development of artificial intelligence based regional flood estimation techniques for Eastern Australia

This chapter focuses on the development of artificial intelligence based regional flood frequency analysis (RFFA) techniques for Eastern Australia. The techniques considered in this study include artificial neural network (ANN), genetic algorithm based artificial neural network (GAANN), gene-expression programing (GEP) and co-active neuro fuzzy inference system (CANFIS). This uses data from 452 small to medium sized catchments from Eastern Australia. In the development/training of the artificial intelligence based RFFA models, the selected 452 catchments are divided into two groups: (i) training data set, consisting of 362 catchments; and (ii) validation data set, consisting of 90 catchments. It has been shown that in the training of the four artificial intelligence based RFFA models, no model performs the best across all the considered six average recurrence intervals (AR!s) for all the adopted statistical criteria. Overall, the ANN based RFFA model is found to outperform the other three models in the training. Based on an independent validation, the median relative error values for the ANN based RFFA model are found to be in the range of 35-44% for eastern Australia. The results show that ANN based RFFA model is applicable to eastern Australia.