Predicting river dissolved oxygen time series based on stand-alone models and hybrid wavelet-based models

Accurate prediction of dissolved oxygen time series is important for improving the water environment and aiding water resource management. In this study, four stand-alone models including multiple linear regression (MLR), support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN) and random forest (RF), and four hybrid models based on wavelet transform (WT) including WT-MLR, WT-SVM, WT-ANN and WT-RF were used to predict the daily dissolved oxygen (DO) at 1–5-day lead times in the Dongjiang River Basin, China. To make the prediction robust, the maximal information coefficient (MIC) was used to capture comprehensive information between DO and explanatory variables. The 5-fold cross validation grid search approach was used to optimize parameters of machine learning tools. Two types of frameworks of WT: direct framework (i.e., only the explanatory variables were decomposed) and multicomponent framework (i.e., both explanatory variables and target variables were decomposed) were used to construct hybrid models. The results show that MIC extracts four optimal explanatory variables: previous DO, water temperature, air temperature and air pressure. Four evaluation parameters including correlation coefficient (R), Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) indicate that the prediction accuracy decreases as the lead time changes from 1 to 5 days. In terms of the stand-alone models, MLR model outperforms the other three models with higher NSE values of 0.616–0.921, and lower RMSE values of 0.503–1.111. With regard to the hybrid models, WT-ANN and WT-MLR models exhibit higher performance, and multicomponent framework performs better than direct framework in all hybrid models. In general, the multicomponent framework of WT can improve the prediction accuracy of stand-alone models at a certain degree, while the direct framework shows no obvious advantage.