Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Chuyang, Roy, Tirthankar, Tartakovsky, Daniel M., Dwivedi, Dipankar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11587
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912073462579200
author Liu, Chuyang
Roy, Tirthankar
Tartakovsky, Daniel M.
Dwivedi, Dipankar
author_facet Liu, Chuyang
Roy, Tirthankar
Tartakovsky, Daniel M.
Dwivedi, Dipankar
contents Hydrological models often involve constitutive laws that may not be optimal in every application. We propose to replace such laws with the Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs), a class of neural networks designed to identify symbolic expressions. We demonstrate KAN's potential on the problem of baseflow identification, a notoriously challenging task plagued by significant uncertainty. KAN-derived functional dependencies of the baseflow components on the aridity index outperform their original counterparts. On a test set, they increase the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) by 67%, decrease the root mean squared error by 30%, and increase the Kling-Gupta efficiency by 24%. This superior performance is achieved while reducing the number of fitting parameters from three to two. Next, we use data from 378 catchments across the continental United States to refine the water-balance equation at the mean-annual scale. The KAN-derived equations based on the refined water balance outperform both the current aridity index model, with up to a 105% increase in NSE, and the KAN-derived equations based on the original water balance. While the performance of our model and tree-based machine learning methods is similar, KANs offer the advantage of simplicity and transparency and require no specific software or computational tools. This case study focuses on the aridity index formulation, but the approach is flexible and transferable to other hydrological processes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_11587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Baseflow identification via explainable AI with Kolmogorov-Arnold networks
Liu, Chuyang
Roy, Tirthankar
Tartakovsky, Daniel M.
Dwivedi, Dipankar
Machine Learning
Hydrological models often involve constitutive laws that may not be optimal in every application. We propose to replace such laws with the Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs), a class of neural networks designed to identify symbolic expressions. We demonstrate KAN's potential on the problem of baseflow identification, a notoriously challenging task plagued by significant uncertainty. KAN-derived functional dependencies of the baseflow components on the aridity index outperform their original counterparts. On a test set, they increase the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) by 67%, decrease the root mean squared error by 30%, and increase the Kling-Gupta efficiency by 24%. This superior performance is achieved while reducing the number of fitting parameters from three to two. Next, we use data from 378 catchments across the continental United States to refine the water-balance equation at the mean-annual scale. The KAN-derived equations based on the refined water balance outperform both the current aridity index model, with up to a 105% increase in NSE, and the KAN-derived equations based on the original water balance. While the performance of our model and tree-based machine learning methods is similar, KANs offer the advantage of simplicity and transparency and require no specific software or computational tools. This case study focuses on the aridity index formulation, but the approach is flexible and transferable to other hydrological processes.
title Baseflow identification via explainable AI with Kolmogorov-Arnold networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11587