An Ensemble Modeling Approach to Forecast Daily Reservoir Inflow Using Bidirectional Long- and Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD), and Energy Entropy Method

Daily inflow forecasts provide important decision support for the operations and management of reservoirs. Accurate and reliable forecasting plays an important role in the optimal management of water resources. Numerous studies have shown that decomposition integration models have good prediction capacity. Considering the nonlinearity and unsteady state of daily incoming flow data, a hybrid model of adaptive variational mode decomposition (VMD) and bidirectional long- and short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) based on energy entropy was developed for daily inflow forecast. The model was analyzed using the mean absolute error (MAE), the root means square error (RMSE), Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE), and correlation coefficient (r). A historical daily inflow series of the Baozhusi Hydropower Station, China, is investigated by the proposed VMD-BiLSTM with hybrid models. For comparison, BP, GRNN, ELMAN, SVR, LSTM, Bi-LSTM, EMD-LSTM, and VMD-LSTM, were adopted and analyzed for evaluation and analyzed. We found that the proposed model, with MAE = 38.965, RMSE = 64.783, and NSE = 95.7%, was superior to the other models. Therefore, the hybrid model is robust and efficient for forecasting highly nonstationary and nonlinear streamflow. It can be used as the preferred data-driven tool to predict the daily inflow flow, which can ensure the safe operation of hydropower stations in reservoirs. As an interdisciplinary field spanning both machine learning and hydrology, daily inflow forecasting can become an important breakthrough in the application of deep learning to hydrology.