Residual Temporal Convolutional Network With Dual Attention Mechanism for Multilead-Time Interpretable Runoff Forecasting

As a pivotal subfield within the domain of time series forecasting, runoff forecasting plays a crucial role in water resource management and scheduling. Recent advancements in the application of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and attention mechanisms have markedly enhanced the accuracy of runoff forecasting models. This article introduces an innovative hybrid model, ResTCN-DAM, which synergizes the strengths of deep residual network (ResNet), temporal convolutional networks (TCNs), and dual attention mechanisms (DAMs). The proposed ResTCN-DAM is designed to leverage the unique attributes of these three modules: TCN has outstanding capability to process time series data in parallel. By combining with modified ResNet, multiple TCN layers can be densely stacked to capture more hidden information in the temporal dimension. DAM module adeptly captures the interdependencies within both temporal and feature dimensions, adeptly accentuating relevant time steps/features while diminishing less significant ones with minimal computational cost. Furthermore, the snapshot ensemble method is able to obtain the effect of training multiple models through one single training process, which ensures the accuracy and robustness of the forecasts. The deep integration and collaborative cooperation of these modules comprehensively enhance the model’s forecasting capability from various perspectives. Ablation studies conducted validate the efficacy of each module, and through multiple sets of comparative experiments, it is shown that the proposed ResTCN-DAM has exceptional and consistent performance across varying lead times. We also employ visualization techniques to display heatmaps of the model’s weights, thereby enhancing the interpretability of the model. When compared with the prevailing neural network-based runoff forecasting models, ResTCN-DAM exhibits state-of-the-art accuracy, temporal robustness, and interpretability, positioning it at the forefront of contemporary research.