The amount of groundwater related data is drastically increasing domestically from various sources since 2000. To justify the more expansive continuation of the data acquisition and to derive valuable implications from the data, continued employments of sophisticated and state-of-the-arts statistical tools in the analyses and predictions are important issue. In the present study, we employed a well established machine learning technique of Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model in the trend analyses of groundwater level for the long-term change. The major benefit of GPR model is that the model provide not only the future predictions but also the associated uncertainty. In the study, the long-term predictions of groundwater level from the stations of National Groundwater Monitoring Network located within Han River Basin were exemplified as prediction cases based on the GPR model. In addition, a few types of groundwater change patterns were delineated (i.e., increasing, decreasing, and no trend) on the basis of the statistics acquired from GPR analyses. From the study, it was found that the majority of the monitoring stations has decreasing trend while small portion shows increasing or no trend. To further analyze the causes of the trend, the corresponding precipitation data were jointly analyzed by the same method (i.e., GPR). Based on the analyses, the major cause of decreasing trend of groundwater level is attributed to reduction of precipitation rate whereas a few of the stations show weak relationship between the pattern of groundwater level changes and precipitation.

Keywords: Gaussian process regression (GPR);Machine learning;Groundwater level trend analysis;National Groundwater Monitoring Network (NGMN);Han River basin;