Hernan A. Moreno

Isabela Suaza-Sierra, Hernan A. Moreno, Luis A De la Fuente et al.

Accurate prediction of Reservoir Water Temperature (RWT) is vital for sustainable water management, ecosystem health, and climate resilience. Yet, prediction alone offers limited insight into the governing physical processes. To bridge this gap, we integrated explainable machine learning (ML) with symbolic modeling to uncover the drivers of RWT dynamics across ten reservoirs in the Red River Basin, USA, using over 10,000 depth-resolved temperature profiles. We first employed ensemble and neural models, including Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), achieving high predictive skill (best RMSE = 1.20 degree Celsius, R^2 = 0.97). Using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), we quantified the contribution of physical drivers such as air temperature, depth, wind, and lake volume, revealing consistent patterns across reservoirs. To translate these data-driven insights into compact analytical expressions, we developed Kolmogorov Arnold Networks (KANs) to symbolically approximate RWT. Ten progressively complex KAN equations were derived, improving from R^2 = 0.84 using a single predictor (7-day antecedent air temperature) to R^2 = 0.92 with ten predictors, though gains diminished beyond five, highlighting a balance between simplicity and accuracy. The resulting equations, dominated by linear and rational forms, incrementally captured nonlinear behavior while preserving interpretability. Depth consistently emerged as a secondary but critical predictor, whereas precipitation had limited effect. By coupling predictive accuracy with explanatory power, this framework demonstrates how KANs and explainable ML can transform black-box models into transparent surrogates that advance both prediction and understanding of reservoir thermal dynamics.

Luis A. De la Fuente, Hernan A. Moreno, Laura V. Alvarez et al.

Interpreting complex datasets remains a major challenge for scientists, particularly due to high dimensionality and collinearity among variables. We introduce a novel application of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to enhance interpretability and parsimony beyond what traditional correlation analyses offer. We present two interpretable, color-coded visualization tools: the Pairwise KAN Matrix (PKAN) and the Multivariate KAN Contribution Matrix (MKAN). PKAN characterizes nonlinear associations between pairs of variables, while MKAN serves as a nonlinear feature-ranking tool that quantifies the relative contributions of inputs in predicting a target variable. These tools support pre-processing (e.g., feature selection, redundancy analysis) and post-processing (e.g., model explanation, physical insights) in model development workflows. Through experimental comparisons, we demonstrate that PKAN and MKAN yield more robust and informative results than Pearson Correlation and Mutual Information. By capturing the strength and functional forms of relationships, these matrices facilitate the discovery of hidden physical patterns and promote domain-informed model development.