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The prediction of the Migration rate of meandering rivers using Machine learning models
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  • Hossein Amini,
  • Federico Monegaglia,
  • Marco Tubino,
  • Guido Zolezzi
Hossein Amini
Università degli Studi di Trento

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Federico Monegaglia
Università degli Studi di Trento
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Marco Tubino
Università degli Studi di Trento
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Guido Zolezzi
Università degli Studi di Trento
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Abstract

River meandering is the natural process that many lowland rivers undergo as a consequence of the alternation of bank erosion and accretion, which leads to the typical shape of the so-called meandering rivers. During the last decades, numerous modelling studies have been developed to reproduce their planform dynamics and to predict their future evolution. Most of these modelling approaches are physics-based, meaning that they solve the mathematical equations of shallow water open channel flow and fluvial sediment transport. Other types of modelling are very rare. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to promising results in many fields of science but their potential seems to have been so far rather unexplored in the prediction of meandering rivers morphodynamics. In this study, we have developed machine learning (hereinafter ML) models to compute the meander lateral migration rate based on training dataset: once the model has been trained with known migration rates and curvature values at two consecutive time steps, it is used to predict migration rates at the following time step. To this aim, the train and test dataset is coming from the outputs of a semi-analytical meander morphodynamic model which provides simulated evolving meandering planforms (described through the spatial curvature distribution) and migration rates computed through the excess near bank velocity. Such migration has been considered as the “Target” in the present study. The results for different models such as linear regression, feedforward neural network, SVM, and XGBoost were compared. It indicates that the “XGBoost” model with approximately 80 percent of accuracy in the prediction of the next time step, has the best result among them. This is just an opening chapter for the usage of ML in morphodynamics of meandering rivers and with advanced methods, there will be promising results ahead.