Water Flow Prediction Based on Improved Spatiotemporal Attention Mechanism of Long Short-Term Memory Network

Abstract

The prediction of water plant flow should establish relationships between upstream and downstream hydrological stations, which is crucial for the early detection of flow anomalies. Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) have been widely applied in hydrological time series forecasting. However, due to the highly nonlinear and dynamic nature of hydrological time series, as well as the intertwined coupling of data between multiple hydrological stations, the original LSTM models fail to simultaneously consider the spatiotemporal correlations among input sequences for flow prediction. To address this issue, we propose a novel flow prediction method based on the Spatiotemporal Attention LSTM (STA-LSTM) model. This model, based on an encoder–decoder architecture, integrates spatial attention mechanisms in the encoder to adaptively capture hydrological variables relevant to prediction. The decoder combines temporal attention mechanisms to better propagate gradient information and dynamically discover key encoder hidden states from all time steps within a window. Additionally, we construct an extended dataset, which preprocesses meteorological data with forward filling and rainfall encoding, and combines hydrological data from multiple neighboring pumping stations with external meteorological data to enhance the modeling capability of spatiotemporal relationships. In this paper, the actual production data of pumping stations and water plants along the East-to-West Water Diversion Project are taken as examples to verify the effectiveness of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that our STA-LSTM model can better capture spatiotemporal relationships, yielding improved prediction performance with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 3.57, a root mean square error (RMSE) of 4.61, and a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.001. Additionally, our model achieved a 3.96% increase in R2 compared to the baseline model.