Deformation forecasting of a hydropower dam by hybridizing a long short‐term memory deep learning network with the coronavirus optimization algorithm.

The safety operation and management of hydropower dam play a critical role in social‐economic development and ensure people's safety in many countries; therefore, modeling and forecasting the hydropower dam's deformations with high accuracy is crucial. This research aims to propose and validate a new model based on deep learning long short‐term memory (LSTM) and the coronavirus optimization algorithm (CVOA), named CVOA‐LSTM, for forecasting the deformations of the hydropower dam. The second‐largest hydropower dam of Vietnam, located in the Hoa Binh province, is focused. Herein, we used the LSTM to establish the deformation model, whereas the CVOA was utilized to optimize the three parameters of the LSTM, the number of hidden layers, the learning rate, and the dropout. The efficacy of the proposed CVOA‐LSTM model is assessed by comparing its forecasting performance with state‐of‐the‐art benchmarks, sequential minimal optimization for support vector regression, Gaussian process, M5' model tree, multilayer perceptron neural network, reduced error pruning tree, random tree, random forest, and radial basis function neural network. The result shows that the proposed CVOA‐LSTM model has high forecasting capability (R2 = 0.874, root mean square error = 0.34, mean absolute error = 0.23) and outperforms the benchmarks. We conclude that CVOA‐LSTM is a new tool that can be considered to forecast the hydropower dam's deformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]