Stepwise decomposition-integration-prediction framework for runoff forecasting considering boundary correction

Predicting river runoff accurately is of substantial significance for flood control, water resource allocation, and basin ecological dispatching. To explore the reasonable and effective application of time series decomposition in runoff forecasting, this study proposed a novel stepwise decomposition-integration-prediction considering boundary correction (SDIPBC) framework by using the stepwise decomposition sampling method and multi-input neural network. On this basis, we implemented a hybrid forecasting model combining seasonal-trend decomposition procedures based on loess (STL) with the long short-term memory (LSTM) network called STL-LSTM (SDIPBC) to estimate mid-long term river runoff. The reliability of the method was assessed using the historical runoff series of the Lianghekou and Jinping I Reservoirs in the Yalong River Basin, China, and developed several single models and hybrid models for comparative experiments. The results show that the existing decomposition-based hybrid forecasting frameworks are not suitable for practical runoff forecasting. The proposed SDIPBC framework can avoid using future information and improve the prediction accuracy of the single prediction model. For the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE), the ten-day runoff forecasting accuracy of STL-LSTM (SDIPBC) in Lianghekou reservoir and Jinping I Reservoirs reached 0.845 and 0.862 respectively, which improved 1.81 % and 2.38 % than the single LSTM model, indicating that this is a practical and reliable decomposition-based hybrid runoff forecasting method. [Display omitted] •This study proposes a new reasonable and practical decomposition-based hybrid runoff forecasting framework.•The hybrid runoff forecasting framework can strictly avoid the information leakage during decomposition sampling.•The hybrid runoff forecasting framework can effectively improve the overall prediction accuracy.