A comparison of the rainfall-runoff modelling skill of two ANN configurations, i.e. an MLP and an RBF, is
presented. The results suggest that the choice of the type of network certainly has an impact on the model prediction accuracy. However, a judgment on which is superior is clearly not possible from this study. Both
networks have merits and limitations. In the case of the MLP, the optimal number of hidden neurons is to
be fixed after a long trial-and-error procedure, whereas in the RBF networks the significant regressors can be
fixed using the OLS algorithm. However, the results of the study indicate that the generalization properties
of RBF networks are poor compared with those of MLPs in rainfall-runoff modelling.