Classifying Annual Daily Hydrographs in Western North America using
t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE)
Abstract
Flow regimes are critical for determining physical and biological
processes in rivers, and their classification and regionalization
traditionally seeks to link patterns of flow to physiographic, climate
and other information. There are many approaches to, and rationales for,
catchment classification, with those focused on streamflow often seeking
to relate a particular response characteristic to a physical property or
climatic driver. Rationales include such topics as Prediction in
Ungauged Basins (PUB), helping with experimental approaches, and
providing guidance for model selection in poorly understood hydrological
systems. While scale and time are important considerations for
classification, the Annual Daily Hydrograph (ADH) is a first-order
easily visualized integrated expression of catchment function, and over
many years is a distinct hydrological signature. In this study, we use
t-SNE, a state-of-the-art technique of dimensionality reduction, to
classify 17110 ADHs for 304 reference catchments in mountainous Western
North America. t-SNE is chosen over other conventional methods of
dimensionality reduction (e.g. PCA) as it presents greater separability
of ADHs, which are projected on a 2D map where the similarities are
evaluated according to their map distance. We then utilize a Deep
Learning encoder to upgrade the non-parametric t-SNE to a parametric
approach, enhancing its capability to address ‘unseen’ samples. Results
showed that t-SNE was an effective classifier as it successfully
clustered ADHs of similar flow regimes on the 2D map. In addition, many
compact clusters on the 2D map in the coastal Pacific Northwest suggest
information redundancy in the local hydrometric network. The t-SNE map
provides an intuitive way to visualize the similarity of
high-dimensional data of ADHs, groups catchments with like
characteristics, and avoids the reliance on subjective hydrometric
indicators.