Sediment load estimation is generally required for study and development of water resources system. In this regard, artificial neural network (ANN) is the most widely used modeling tool especially in data-constraint regions. This research attempts to combine SSA (singular spectrum analysis) with ANN, hereafter called SSA-ANN model, with expectation to improve the accuracy of sediment load predicted by the existing ANN approach. Two different catchments located in the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) were selected for the study and the model performance was measured by several statistical indices. In comparing with ANN, the proposed SSA-ANN model shows its better performance repeatedly in both catchments. In validation stage, SSA-ANN is superior for larger Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency about 24% in Ban Nong Kiang catchment and 7% in Nam Mae Pun Luang catchment. Other statistical measures of SSA-ANN are better than those of ANN as well. This improvement reveals the importance of SSA which filters noise containing in the raw time series and transforms the original input data to be near normal distribution which is favorable to model simulation. This coupled model is also recommended for the prediction of other water resources variables because extra input data are not required. Only additional computation, time series decomposition, is needed. The proposed technique could be potentially used to minimize the costly operation of sediment measurement in the LMB which is relatively rich in hydrometeorological records.
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