River flood prediction through flow level modeling using multi-attention encoder-decoder-based TCN with filter-wrapper feature selection

Floods, among the most destructive climate-induced natural disasters, necessitate effective prediction models for early warning systems. The proposed Multi-Attention Encoder-Decoder-based Temporal Convolutional Network (MA-TCN-ED) prediction model combines the strengths of the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), Multi-Attention (MA) mechanism, and Encoder-Decoder (ED) architecture along with filter-wrapper feature selection for optimal feature selection. This framework aims to improve flood prediction accuracy by effectively capturing temporal dependencies and intricate patterns in atmospheric and hydro-meteorological data. The proposed framework was pervasively assessed for predicting the real-world flood-related data of the river Meenachil, Kerala, and the results showed that MA-TCN-ED using a filter-wrapper feature selection approach achieved higher accuracy in flood prediction. Further the model was validated on the dataset of river Pamba, Kerala. The proposed model exhibits better performance with about 32% reduced MAE, 39% reduced RMSE, 12% increased NSE, 14% enhanced R², and 17% enhanced accuracy relative to the average performance of all the compared baseline models. The proposed work holds promise for enhancing early warning systems and mitigating the impact of floods and contributes to the broader understanding of leveraging deep learning models for effective climate-related risk mitigation.