Ant Colony Optimization for Estimating Parameters of Flood Frequency Distributions

The primary objective of frequency analysis is to relate the magnitudes of extreme events to their frequencies of occurrence with the use of probability distributions. The accuracy of hydrologic frequency analysis depends on the type of statistical distributions and parameter estimation techniques. A lot of models have been developed to describe the frequency distributions of hydrological data. The present study focuses on the application of ant colony optimization for estimating parameters of commonly used flood frequency distributions. To fulfill this aim, an improved ant colony optimization is developed and its results are compared with some conventional methods using annual maximum discharge data of rivers from East Azerbaijan, Iran. Results indicate that the presented algorithm is suitable for parameter estimation.

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