Artificial neural networks have been used successfully in a number of areas
of civil engineering, including hydrology and water resources engineering.
In the vast majority of cases, multilayer perceptrons that are trained wit
h the back-propagation algorithm are used. One of the major shortcomings of
this approach is that it is difficult to elicit the knowledge about the in
put/output mapping that is stored in the trained networks. One way to overc
ome this problem is to use B-spline associative memory networks (AMNs), bec
ause their connection weights may be interpreted as a set of fuzzy membersh
ip functions and hence the relationship between the model inputs and output
s may be written as a set of fuzzy rules. In this paper, multilayer percept
rons and AMN models are compared, and their main advantages and disadvantag
es are discussed. The performance of both model types is compared in terms
of prediction accuracy and model transparency for a particular water qualit
y case study, the forecasting (4 weeks in advance) of concentrations of the
cyanobacterium Anabaena spp. in the River Murray at Morgan, South Australi
a. The forecasts obtained using both model types are good. Neither model cl
early outperforms the other, although the forecasts obtained when the B-spl
ine AMN model is used may be considered slightly better overall. In additio
n, the B-spline AMN model provides more explicit information about the rela
tionship between the model inputs and outputs. The fuzzy rules extracted fr
om the B-spline AMN model indicate that incidences of Anabaena spp, are lik
ely to occur after the passing of a flood hydrograph and when water tempera
tures are high.