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Artificial neural networks (ANNs) in conjugation with genetic algorithms (GAs) have been demonstrated to be an effective tool for system modelling and optimization in a variety of applications. The current communique is about assessing the capacity of ANN to predict investment on cattle till age at first calving (AFC) and milk production based on the data of 340 Vrindavani crossbreed cattle developed at the ICAR-Indian Veterinary Research Institute in Izatnagar, India. Three distinct artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms, namely, Levenberg–Marquardt (LM), Bayesian regularization (BR), and gradient descent momentum with adaptive learning rate backpropagation (GDX) were used to train the ANN infrastructure for determining milk production and investment based on body weight and AFC as input variables. The results showed that BR with 2 hidden layer neurons showed excellent prediction ability (R2 = 0.999, MSE < 10−6) and was therefore used as an objective function by GA for optimization. The optimized results revealed that higher milk production is achievable at lower investment if the age at first calving is 768 days with a body weight of ∼281 kg. The information generated by this investigation will aid in ensuring food security in terms of higher milk production while making the dairy business more sustainable and profitable for the farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rivers are the agents on earth and act as the main pathways for transporting the continental weathered materials into the sea. The estimation of suspended sediment yield (SSY) is important in the design, planning and management of water resources. The SSY depends on many factors and their interrelationships, which are very nonlinear and complex. The traditional approaches are unable to solve these complex nonlear processes of SSY. Thus, the development of a reliable and accurate model for estimating the SSY is essential. The goal of this research was to develop a single hybrid artificial intelligence model, which is a hybridization of the artificial neural network (ANN) and genetic algorithm (GA) (ANN-GA) for the estimation of SSY in the Mahanadi River (MR), India, by combining data from 11-gauge stations into a single hybrid generalized model and applying it to every gauging station for estimating the SSY. All parameters of the ANN model were optimized automatically and simultaneously using GA to estimate the SSY. The proposed model was developed considering the temporal monthly hydro-climatic data, such as temperature (T), rainfall (RF), water discharge (Q) and SSY and spatial data, including the rock type (RT), catchment area (CA) and relief (R), of all 11 gauging stations in the MR. The performances of the conventional sediment rating curve (SRC), ANN and multiple linear regression (MLR) were compared with the hybrid ANN-GA model. It was noticed that the ANN-GA model provided with greatest coefficient of correlation (0.8710) and lowest root mean square error (0.0088) values among all comparative SRC, ANN and MLR. Thus, the proposed ANN-GA is most appropriate model compared to other examined models for estimating SSY in the MR Basin, India, particularly at the Tikarapara measuring station. If no measures of SSY are available in the MR, then the modelling approach could be used to estimate SSY at ungauged or gauge stations in the MR Basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rivers are an integral part of the hydrological cycle and are the major geological agents which erode the continents and transport water and sediments to the oceans. Thus rivers act an important link between continents and oceans for the mass balance. Estimating the suspended sediment yield is one of the crucial aims in the field of managing, designing and planning of any river system or reservoir. To determine the suspended sediment yield in a river basin demands more labour or it is more costly when automatic sampling devices are used. The number of variables and the inter-relationship existing among them influence the suspended sediment yield and the nature of these inter-relationships is neither linear nor simple. Unfortunately, it is a difficult task to determine the suspended sediment yield when traditional mathematical models are used as complex variables and processes are involved. The major key factors, such as basin geology (rock type), relief, rainfall, temperature, water discharge and catchment area that affect sediment yield, are used as inputs to develop the model for predicting the suspended sediment yield in the Mahanadi River. In this paper, a multi-objective genetic algorithm for artificial neural network (MOGA-ANN)-based approach is used for predicting the suspended sediment yield. The MOGA assists ANN to minimize the two competing objectives, i.e. mean error and variance simultaneously. Thus in this study, a hybrid artificial intelligence-based method, MOGA-ANN model, is developed using the hydro-geological-climatic factors where all parameters associated with the ANN models are optimized simultaneously using MOGAs to estimate the suspended sediment yield in the Mahanadi River basin. The ANN's parameters are optimized globally by the MOGA to accurate estimation. The study has been carried out to develop MOGA-ANN for estimating the suspended sediment load using 20-year data at the Tikarapara gauging station which is the last downstream station in the Mahanadi River. The MOGA-ANN model provided the root mean square error 0.0281, correlation coefficient (r) 0.966 and efficiency factor 0.919 during the testing phase. The results suggested that the hybrid MOGA-ANN model exhibited satisfactory performance with an accuracy of 96.41%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chhana cake, locally termed chhana podo, is a baked traditional dairy product of India. The present study was undertaken for optimization of process parameters pertaining to production of chhana podo. Independent variables, namely, moisture content of feed-mix: 52.5 - 62.5% (wb), baking temperature: 60 - 180°C, baking time: 1 - 9 h and height of feed-mix: 1 - 5 cm were selected heuristically and their effect on dependent variables, namely, hardness, whiteness index, yellowness index, tint of crust and crumb, moisture content and expansion ratio of chhana podo were studied. Although quadratic models fitted to responses exhibited relative deviation percent (Rd) ranging from 1.214 to 5.406%; lack of fit was significant for all responses except crust yellowness index and crust tint. Neural network modeling was adopted (Rd for training = 1.739%, Rd for validation = 1.845%) and relative importance of factors on responses were found. Optimum conditions obtained from genetic algorithm were: moisture content of feed-mix = 57.43% (wb), baking temperature = 151.4°C, baking time = 4.35 h, height of mix = 2.9 cm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose elitist genetic algorithms-based artificial neural network (ANN) model for setting up an early warning system for occurrence of high inflation. The proposed warning system uses values of an appropriate set of economic fundamental variables as input and builds an ANN model for quantifying the possibility of high inflation within a fixed period of time window. Elitism-based generational genetic algorithm is used for optimizing the architecture of the ANN model. We empirically evaluate the proposed neuro-genetic approach to identify the class of leading economic indicators and build an early warning signalling system of an occurrence of high inflation (overall and component inflations) using the data from the Indian economy. We further compare the results of the proposed approach with the commonly used data-driven signals approach. In the empirical studies, we observe promising performance of the proposed neuro-genetic warning system, which is capable of generating accurate early warning signals of an impending high inflation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Seed planting equipment with inclined plate seed metering devices is the most commonly used equipment for planting of peanut crop in India. For obtaining the high yield, it is very essential to drop the peanut seeds in rows maintaining accurate seed rate and seed spacing with minimum damage to seeds during metering. This mainly depends on the forward speed of the planting equipment, rotary speed of the metering plate and the area of cells on the plate. The relationship between these factors and the performance parameters viz., seed rate, seed spacing and percent seed damage can be established using regression analysis. But they may not be very accurate and consistent throughout the solution space. Hence, an attempt has been made in this paper to develop the feed forward artificial neural network (ANN) models for the prediction of the performance parameters of an inclined plate seed metering device. The data were generated in the laboratory by conducting experiments on a sticky belt test stand provided with a seed metering device and an opto-electronic seed counter. The generated data was used to develop both statistical and neural network models. The optimum architecture of the neural network models was determined using genetic algorithm (GA) as a single objective constrained optimization problem. The performance of the developed models was compared among themselves for 4 randomly generated test cases. The results show that the ANN model predicted the performance parameters of the seed metering device better than the statistical models. It is possible to determine the optimum levels of the input parameters to obtain the desired performance parameters of the seed metering device by performing reverse mapping of the developed ANN models. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The effect of data pre-processing while developing artificial intelligence (AI) -based data-driven techniques, such as artificial neural networks (ANN), model trees (MT) and linear genetic programming (LGP), is studied for Pawana Reservoir in Maharashtra, India. The daily one-step-ahead inflow forecasts are compared with flows generated from a univariate autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model. For the full-year data series, a large error is found mainly due to the occurrence of zero values, since the reservoir is located in an intermittent river. Hence, all the techniques are evaluated using two data series: 18 years of daily full-year inflow data (from 1 January to 31 December); and 18 years of daily monsoon season inflow data (from 1 June to 31 October) to take into account the intermittent nature of the data. The relevant range of inputs for each category is selected based on autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation analyses of the inflow series. Conventional pre-processing methods, such as transformation and/or normalization of data, do not perform well because of the large variation in magnitudes, as well as the many zero values (65% of the full-year data series). Therefore, the input data are pre-processed into un-weighted moving average (MA) series of 3 days, 5 days and 7 days. The 3-day MA series performs better, maintaining the peak inflow pattern as in the actual data series, while the coarser-scale (5-day and 7-day) MA series reduce the peak inflow pattern, leading to more errors in peak inflow prediction. The results indicate that AI methods are powerful tools for modelling the daily flow time series with appropriate data pre-processing, in spite of the presence of many zero values. The time-lagged recurrent network (TLRN) ANN modelling technique applied in this study maps the inflow forecasting in a better way than the standard multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural networks, especially in the case of the seasonal data series. The MT technique performs equally well for low and medium inflows, but fails to predict the peak inflows. However, LGP outperforms the other AI models, and also the ARIMA model, for all inflow magnitudes. In the LGP model, the daily full-year data series with more zero inflow values performs better than the daily seasonal models. Citation Jothiprakash, V. & Kote, A. S. (2011) Improving the performance of data-driven techniques through data pre-processing for modelling daily reservoir inflow. Hydrol. Sci. J. 56(1), 168-186. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate prediction of groundwater level is important for the efficient use and management of groundwater resources, particularly in sub-humid regions where water surplus in monsoon season and water scarcity in non-monsoon season is a common phenomenon. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a hybrid neural model (ANN-GA) employing an artificial neural network (ANN) model in conjunction with famous optimization strategy called genetic algorithms (GA) for accurate prediction of groundwater levels in the lower Mahanadi river basin of Orissa State, India. Three types of functionally different algorithm-based ANN models (viz. back-propagation (GDX), Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) and Bayesian regularization (BR)) were used to compare the strength of proposed hybrid model in the efficient prediction of groundwater fluctuations. The ANN-GA hybrid modeling was carried out with lead-time of 1 week and study mainly aimed at November and January months of a year. Overall, simulation results suggest that the Bayesian regularization model is the most efficient of the ANN models tested for the study period. However, a strong correlation between the observed and predicted groundwater levels was observed for all the models. The results reveal that the hybrid GA-based ANN algorithm is able to produce better accuracy and performance in medium and high groundwater level predictions compared to conventional ANN techniques including Bayesian regularization model. Furthermore, the study shows that hybrid neural models can offer significant implications for improving groundwater management and water supply planning in semi-arid areas where aquifer information is not available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate forecasting of streamflow is essential for the efficient operation of water resources systems. The streamflow process is complex and highly nonlinear. Therefore, researchers try to devise alterative techniques to forecast streamflow with relative ease and reasonable accuracy, although traditional deterministic and conceptual models are available. The present work uses three data-driven techniques, namely artificial neural networks (ANN), genetic programming (GP) and model trees (MT) to forecast river flow one day in advance at two stations in the Narmada catchment of India, and the results are compared. All the models performed reasonably well as far as accuracy of prediction is concerned. It was found that the ANN and MT techniques performed almost equally well, but GP performed better than both these techniques, although only marginally in terms of prediction accuracy in normal and extreme events. Citation Londhe, S. & Charhate, S. (2010) Comparison of data-driven modelling techniques for river flow forecasting. Hydrol. Sci. J. 55(7), 1163-1174. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flood forecasting at Jamtara gauging site of the Ajay River Basin in Jharkhand, India is carried out using an artificial neural network (ANN) model, an adaptive neuro-fuzzy interference system (ANFIS) model, and an adaptive neuro-GA integrated system (ANGIS) model. Relative performances of these models are also compared. Initially the ANN model is developed and is then integrated with fuzzy logic to develop an ANFIS model. Further, the ANN weights are optimized by genetic algorithm (GA) to develop an ANGIS model. For development of these models, 20 rainfall–runoff events are selected, of which 15 are used for model training and five are used for validation. Various performance measures are used to evaluate and compare the performances of different models. For the same input data set ANGIS model predicts flood events with maximum accuracy. ANFIS and ANN model perform similarly in some cases, but ANFIS model predicts better than the ANN model in most of the cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the use of an artificial neural network and a genetic algorithm to model streamflow in the Mahanadi River in India. According to the authors, the interaction between the El Niño-southern oscillation (ENSO) and the equatorial Indian Ocean oscillation (EQUINOO) can improve the forecast of monthly basin-scale streamflow. They argue that to model the complex non-linear relationship between large-scale atmospheric circulation information and basin-scale streamflow measurements requires efficient optimization of an artificial neural network architecture using an evolutionary optimizer.

The article introduces a series of reports presented during the second Neural Network and Genetic Algorithms in Materials Science conference (NGMS 2008) held in Kolkata, India in January.