Water level forecasting for extended lead times using preprocessed data with variational mode decomposition: A case study in Bangladesh

This study suggests a new approach of water level forecasting for extended lead times using original data preprocessing with variational mode decomposition (VMD). Here, two machine learning algorithms including light gradient boosting machine (LGBM) and random forest (RF) were considered to incorporate extended lead times (i.e., 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, and 50 days) forecasting of water levels. At first, the original data at two water level stations (i.e., SW173 and SW269 in Bangladesh) and their decomposed data from VMD were prepared on antecedent lag times to analyze in the datasets of different lead times. Mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), and mean squared error (MSE) were used to evaluate the performance of the machine learning models in water level forecasting. As results, it represents that the errors were minimized when the decomposed datasets were considered to predict water levels, rather than the use of original data standalone. It was also noted that LGBM produced lower MAE, RMSE, and MSE values than RF, indicating better performance. For instance, at the SW173 station, LGBM outperformed RF in both decomposed and original data with MAE values of 0.511 and 1.566, compared to RF's MAE values of 0.719 and 1.644, respectively, in a 30-day lead time. The models' performance decreased with increasing lead time, as per the study findings. In summary, preprocessing original data and utilizing machine learning models with decomposed techniques have shown promising results for water level forecasting in higher lead times. It is expected that the approach of this study can assist water management authorities in taking precautionary measures based on forecasted water levels, which is crucial for sustainable water resource utilization.