Importance of spatial and depth-dependent drivers in groundwater level modeling through machine learning

Abstract. The water and food security of South Asia is embedded in the groundwater resources of the transboundary aquifer system of Indus-Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (IGBM) rivers, which has been subjected to diverse natural and anthropogenic triggers. Thus, understanding the relative importance of such triggers in groundwater level change and developing a prediction framework is essential to sustain future stress. Although a number of studies on groundwater level prediction and simulation exist in the literature, characterization of predictive performances of groundwater level modeling using a large network of ground-based observations (n = 2303) is not yet reported. To identify the spatial and depth-wise predictors influence, here, we used linear regression based dominance analysis and machine learning methods (Support Vector Machine and Artificial Neural…