Genetic Algorithms Applied to Optimize Neural Network Training in Reference Evapotranspiration Estimation

Abstract The increased consumption of natural resources, such as water, has become a global concern. Consequently, determining information that can minimize water consumption, such as evapotranspiration, is increasingly necessary. This research evaluates the capacity of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) in training and fine-tuning the parameters of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) (MLP-GA) to obtain daily values of reference evapotranspiration (ETo) in accordance with the Penman-Monteith FAO-56 method. The method is employed to estimate ETo at 14 weather stations in Brazil. The findings are assessed based on the coefficient of correlation (r), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean percentage error (MPE), and are contrasted with the Hargreaves-Samani, Jensen-Haise, Linacre, Benavides & Lopez, and Hamon methods, along with the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network, which is conventionally trained and employs hyperparameter tuning techniques such as Grid Search (MLP-GRID) and Random Search (MLP-RD). The results show that the MLP-GA is, on average, 12 times faster than MLP-RD and 60 times faster than MLP-GRID, while achieving the highest precision indices in most regions, with an r of 0.99, MAE ranging from 0.11 mm to 0.20 mm, RMSE between 0.14 mm and 0.27 mm, and MPE between 2.49% and 7.09%. These findings suggest the results generated achieve an precision between 92.91% and 97.51% in comparison to the Penman-Monteith method. This confirms that employing Genetic Algorithms (GA) to automate the training and optimization of the model is effective and enhances the neural network's capacity to predict ETo.