Predicting shoreline changes using deep learning techniques with Bayesian optimisation

Accurate prediction of shoreline change is vital for effective coastal planning and management, especially under increasing climate variabilities. This study explores the applicability of deep learning (DL) techniques, particularly Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network-LSTM (CNN-LSTM) models, for shoreline forecasting at monthly to inter-annual timescales, under two modelling approaches—direct input (DI) and autoregressive (AR). All models demonstrated the ability to reproduce temporal shoreline variability, while the autoregressive DL models were performing better.

Further, a noise impact assessment revealed that seasonal decomposition and noise filtering significantly enhanced the model performance. In particular, the models using 52-week data decomposition and residual noise reduction improved the model performance. The reduction of data noises also resulted in narrower ensemble prediction envelopes, indicating that ensemble candidate models behave with low diversity. The temporal data resolution analysis showed that lower data resolutions reduce the predictive performance of the model and at least fortnightly data are required to satisfactorily capture the trend of variability of the shoreline position at this beach.

The use of ensemble predictions, derived from a selected subset of model trials based on their collective performance, proved beneficial by capturing diverse temporal behaviours, thereby offering a quasi-probabilistic forecast with minimal computational cost. Overall, the study underscores the potential of DL models, particularly with autoregressive architectures, for reliable and transferable shoreline change prediction. It also emphasizes the importance of data quality, resolution, and preprocessing in improving model robustness, laying the groundwork for future research into use of DL in multi-scale shoreline predictions.