Forecasting performance of support vector machine for the Poyang Lake's water level

The growth of forecasting models has resulted in the development of an excellent model known as the support vector machine (SVM). SVMs can find a global optimal solution equipped with kernel functions. This research trains and tests the SVM network and constructs the support vector regression prediction model by using hydrologic data. Six hydrologic time series were calculated by different kernel functions (namely, linear, polynomial, radial basis function (RBF)), to determine which kernel is the more suitable hydrologic time series in practice. A new solution is presented to identify the good parameter (C; g) by using grid-search and cross-validation. Results prove that linear SVM is a superior model to polynomial and RBF and produced the most accurate results for modeling hydrologic time series behavior as complex hydrologic phenomena. The case study also shows that the calculation errors were correlated with data characteristics. More stable raw data will result in a more accurate result, whereas more random data will result in a more inaccurate result. Model performance could also be dependent on base data nonlinearity.