A comparative study of adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system and artificial neural networks for predicting groundwater hydraulic head in an arid region

Abstract EN

The aim of this research is to develop a predictive model to estimate the groundwater head in Safwan-Zubair area by using an adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS).

This area represents the southern sector of the Iraqi Desert, an arid region with scarce and limited resources.

The data required for building the ANFIS model are generated using MODFLOW model (V.5.3).

MODFLOW model was calibrated based on field measurements during one year.

MODFLOW model generated (3797) hydraulic head values during each month.

70% of these values (2658 samples) was used for training, 30% of these values (1139 samples) was used for checking.

The accuracy of the ANFIS models are compared with previous work based on artificial neural network (ANN) technique.

Different combination of successive hydraulic heads and recharge rates of groundwater is used as input variables.

There is no significant increase in the estimation accuracy when adding another input variable (recharge rate).

Because the amount of this variable is very little, so its influence on the results was imperceptible.

A comparison of ANFIS and ANN shows that the ANFIS model performs preferable than the ANN model on the checking phase.

ANFIS model combines both fuzzy logic basics and neural networks; thus their properties can be utilized in one frame.

It can be concluded, the ANFIS model appears to be more convenient than the ANN model for predicting groundwater hydraulic head from related input data.