Gap-Filling and Predicting Wave Parameters Using Support Vector Regression Method

Knowledge of relevant oceanographic parameters is of utmost importance in the rational design of coastal structures and ports. Therefore, an accurate prediction of wave parameters is especially important for safety and economic reasons. Recently, statistical learning methods, such as Support Vector Regression (SVR) have been successfully employed by researchers in problems such as lake water level predictions, and significant wave height prediction. The current study reports potential application of a SVR approach to predict the wave spectra and significant wave height. Also the capability of the model to fill data gaps was tested using different approaches. Concurrent wind and wave records (standard meteorological and spectral density data) from 4 stations in 2003, 2007, 2008 and 2009 were used both for the training the SVR system and its verification. The choice of these four locations facilitated the comparison of model performances in different geographical areas. The SVR model was then used to obtain predictions for the wave spectra and also time series of wave parameters (separately for each station) such as its Hs and Tp from spectra and wind records. New approach was used to predict wave spectra comparing to similar studies. Reasonably well correlation was found between the predicted and measured wave parameters. The SVR model was first trained and tested using various methods for selecting training data. Also different values for SVM parameters (e.g. tolerance of termination criterion, cost, and gamma in kernel function) were tested. The best possible results were obtained using a Unix shell script (in Linux) which automatically implements different values for different input parameters and finds the best regression by calculating statistical scores like correlation of coefficient, RMSE, bias and scatter index. Finally for a better understanding of the results, Quantile-Quantile plots were produced. The results show that SVR can be successfully used for prediction of Hs and wave spectrum out of a series of wind and spectral wave parameters inputs. Also it was noticed that SVR is an efficient tool to be used when data gaps are present in the data.