JWSS - Journal of Water and Soil Science

The investigation of local scour below hydraulic structures is so complex that makes it difficult to establish a general model to provide an accurate estimation for the local scour dimension. During the last decades, Data Driven Methods (DDM) have  been used extensively in the modeling and prediction of unknown or complex behaviors of systems One of these methods is Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH), that is a self-organization approach and increasingly produces a  complex model during the performance evaluation of  the input and output data sets. So, the objective of this study was to investigate the potential of the GMDH method in the accurate estimation of local scouring geometry (maximum scour depth, the distance of maximum local scour depth till Ski-jump bucket and length of local scour) below the Siphon spillway with Ski-jump bucket energy dissipaters for a set of experimental data. 80% of data set was used for the training period and the remaining data set was used for the test period. The average values of MSRE, MPRE, CE and RB for the nonlinear second order transfer function (FUNC1) were calculated to be 0.92, 0.02, 8.74, -0.01; also, for the nonlinear first order transfer function (FUNC2), they were 0.85, 0.02, 10.43 and -0.02, respectively. The results indicated that the performance of FUNC1 was better than FUNC2. Also, the value of the coefficient of determination (R2) for the estimation of local scour dimension using different methods such as s linear regression, nonlinear regression and ANN indicated the high performance of the developed model of GMDH in the accurate estimation for local scour dimensions.