A comparative evaluation of shear stress modeling based on machine learning methods in small streams

Predicting shear stress distribution has proved to be a critical problem to solve. Hence, the basic objective of this paper is to develop a prediction of shear stress distribution by machine learning algorithms including artificial neural networks, classification and regression tree, generalized linear models. The data set, which is large and feature-rich, is utilized to improve machine learning-based predictive models and extract the most important predictive factors. The 10-fold cross-validation approach was used to determine the performances of prediction methods. The predictive performances of the proposed models were found to be very close to each other. However, the results indicated that the artificial neural network, which has the R value of 0.92 ± 0.03, achieved the best classification performance overall accuracy on the 10-fold holdout sample. The predictions of all machine learning models were well correlated with measurement data.