“…Han et al (2007) compared the RBF and linear kernel functions and found that even within the same catchment, the ideal function can change under different circumstances. Despite being a relatively new approach to hydrological modelling, SVMs and SVRs have been applied to many of the same problems as ANNs, including rainfallrunoff modelling for water resources planning and flood forecasting at various lead-times (Asefa et al, 2006;Han et al, 2007;Behzad et al, 2009;Rasouli et al, 2012), hydraulic modelling (Liong and Sivapragasam, 2002) and downscaling of GCM output (Tripathi et al, 2006). Genetic Programming (GP; Koza, 1992) is another soft computing approach to non-linear modelling and is based on Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.…”