Forecasting the River Ice Break-Up Date in the Upper Reaches of the Heilongjiang River Based on Machine Learning

Ice-jam floods (IJFs) are a significant hydrological phenomenon in the upper reaches of the Heilongjiang River, posing substantial threats to public safety and property. This study employed various feature selection techniques, including the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), Grey Relational Analysis (GRA), mutual information (MI), and stepwise regression (SR), to identify key predictors of river ice break-up dates. Based on this, we constructed various machine learning models, including Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Backpropagation Neural Network (BPNN), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Regression (SVR). The results indicate that the ice reserves in the Oupu to Heihe section have the most significant impact on the ice break-up date in the Heihe section. Additionally, the accumulated temperature during the break-up period and average temperature before river ice break-up are identified as features closely related to the river’s opening in all four feature selection methods. The choice of feature selection method notably impacts the performance of the machine learning models in predicting the river ice break-up dates. Among the models tested, XGBoost with PCC-based feature selection achieved the highest accuracy (RMSE = 2.074, MAE = 1.571, R2 = 0.784, NSE = 0.756, TSS = 0.950). This study provides a more accurate and effective method for predicting river ice break-up dates, offering a scientific basis for preventing and managing IJF disasters.