Support vector machine approach for longitudinal dispersion coefficients in natural streams

This paper presents the support vector machine approach to predict the longitudinal dispersion coefficients in natural rivers. Collected published data from the literature for the dispersion coefficient for wide range of flow conditions are used for the development and testing of the proposed method. The proposed SVM approach produce satisfactory results with coefficient of determination = 0.9025 and root mean square error = 0.0078 compared to existing predictors for dispersion coefficient. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.