A comparative study of conceptual model and machine learning model for rainfall-runoff simulation

Recently, climate change has affected functional responses of river basins to meteorological variables, emphasizing the importance of rainfall-runoff simulation research. Simultaneously, the growing interest in machine learning has led to its increased application in hydrological studies. However, it is not yet clear whether machine learning models are more advantageous than the conventional conceptual models. In this study, we compared the performance of the conventional GR6J model with the machine learning-based Random Forest model across 38 basins in Korea using both gauged and ungauged basin prediction methods. For gauged basin predictions, each model was calibrated or trained using observed daily runoff data, and their performance was evaluted over a separate validation period. Subsequently, ungauged basin simulations were evaluated using proximity-based parameter regionalization with Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV). In gauged basins, the Random Forest consistently outperformed the GR6J, exhibiting superiority across basins regardless of whether they had strong or weak rainfall-runoff correlations. This suggest that the inherent data-driven training structures of machine learning models, in contrast to the conceptual models, offer distinct advantages in data-rich scenarios. However, the advantages of the machine-learning algorithm were not replicated in ungauged basin predictions, resulting in a lower performance than that of the GR6J. In conclusion, this study suggests that while the Random Forest model showed enhanced performance in trained locations, the existing GR6J model may be a better choice for prediction in ungagued basins.