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Record W7123923582 · doi:10.2166/nh.2025.075

How to out-perform default random forest regression: choosing hyperparameters for applications in large-sample hydrology

2025· article· en· W7123923582 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueHydrology research · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicHydrological Forecasting Using AI
Canadian institutionsRegent CollegeUniversity of British Columbia
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsRandom forestLeverage (statistics)HyperparameterWater resourcesHydrological modellingDeep learning

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT Predictions are a central part of water resources research. Despite their strong theoretical basis, the effective application of physically based models to catchment-scale processes remains an ongoing challenge and there are some important prediction problems that are not easily amenable to a first-principles representation. As such, machine learning (ML) models have been seen as a valid alternative in recent years. In spite of their availability, well-optimized state-of-the-art ML strategies are not widely used in water resources research. Further, some analyses require many model trainings, so sometimes computational time prevents properly optimized hyperparameters. To leverage data and use it effectively to drive scientific advances in the field, it is essential to make ML models accessible to users that may lack a deep understanding of ML by improving automated machine learning resources. ML models such as XGBoost have been recently shown to outperform random forest (RF) models which are traditionally used in water resources research. In this study, based on over 150 water-related datasets, we extensively compare XGBoost and RF. This study provides water scientists with access to quick user-friendly RF and XGBoost model optimization.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.837
Threshold uncertainty score0.843

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.067
GPT teacher head0.376
Teacher spread0.308 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it