A Study on Seepage Pressure Forecasting for Concrete Dams Based on Multi-Scale Preprocessing and Dual-Model Integration

Seepage pressure time series of concrete dams are governed by reservoir water level, rainfall, temperature and long-term aging effects, featured by strong nonstationarity and complex multi-scale fluctuations. Existing decomposition–ensemble methods ignore nonlinear coupling among scale components, suffering low prediction accuracy and poor physical interpretability. Current model fusion schemes fail to adapt to differentiated evolution mechanisms of frequency-varying seepage components and cannot fully mine implicit cross-scale nonlinear correlations. To overcome these drawbacks, this study proposes a concrete dam seepage pressure prediction approach integrating ensemble empirical mode decomposition, multi-scale preprocessing, and optimized dual-model selection combining ridge regression and Transformer–BiLSTM. Ensemble empirical mode decomposition adaptively denoises and decouples raw seepage series into high-, medium- and low-frequency IMFs according to oscillation cycles. A normalized Comprehensive Optimization Index is constructed to parallelly train ridge regression and Transformer–BiLSTM for each component and select the optimal submodel dynamically. A fully connected nonlinear fusion layer reconstructs multi-scale predictions to retain inherent component coupling features, replacing traditional simple linear superposition. Engineering cases verify that the proposed model efficiently captures periodic laws of key influencing factors, significantly boosting prediction accuracy and generalization capacity, thus possessing prominent theoretical and practical engineering application values.