“…Machine learning models have shown encouraging performances in a range of water resources applications, such as rainfallrunoff modelling (Minns and Hall, 1996;Khu et al, 2001;Babovic and Keijzer, 2002;Chiang et al, 2004), streamflow forecasting (Nourani et al, 2009;Meshgi et al, 2014Meshgi et al, , 2015Humphrey et al, 2016;Karimi et al, 2016), estimation of missing data (Elshorbagy et al, 2002), error correction (Sun et al, 2012), water quality modelling (Savic and Khu, 2005;Singh et al, 2011;García-Alba et al, 2019), sediment transport modelling (Babovic and Abbott, 1997;Afan et al, 2014;Safari and Mehr, 2018), reservoir management (Giuliani et al, 2015), prediction of climate variables (Dahamsheh and Aksoy, 2013;Ferreira et al, 2019), because of their potential to apprehend the noise complexity, non-linearity, non-stationarity and dynamism of data (Yaseen et al, 2015). Certainly, if we are only interested in better forecasting results then, the machine learning models might be the preferred choice over the conceptual or process-based models due to their better predictive capability.…”