Human-inspired hyperparameter optimization for long-horizon forecasting of freshwater and desalination per-capita dynamics
摘要
Growing imbalance between freshwater availability and demand, driven by population growth, infrastructure constraints, and climate variability, has increased the need for reliable long-horizon forecasting of freshwater withdrawal and desalination dynamics on a per-capita basis. Although transformer-based models can capture complex temporal dependencies, their performance is highly sensitive to hyperparameter configuration, especially for multivariate and nonstationary environmental data. This study proposes a data-driven framework that integrates the Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer (FEDformer) with the Improved Horse Herd Optimization algorithm (iHOW) for systematic hyperparameter optimization. The framework constructs policy-relevant per-capita indicators from country-level time-series data and evaluates the optimized model through controlled comparison with multiple metaheuristic optimizers under identical computational budgets. The iHOW-optimized FEDformer achieves the best overall performance, with a mean squared error of