Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 25, 831–850, 2021 https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-831-2021 © Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Objective functions for information-theoretical monitoring network design: what is “optimal”? Hossein Foroozand and Steven V. Weijs Department of Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Correspondence: Steven V. Weijs (
[email protected]) Received: 1 April 2020 – Discussion started: 17 April 2020 Revised: 26 November 2020 – Accepted: 7 December 2020 – Published: 19 February 2021 Abstract. This paper concerns the problem of optimal mon- sensors, to identify optimal subsets. Jointly, these papers (Al- itoring network layout using information-theoretical meth- fonso et al., 2010a,b; Li et al., 2012; Ridolfi et al., 2011; ods. Numerous different objectives based on information Samuel et al., 2013; Stosic et al., 2017; Keum and Coulibaly, measures have been proposed in recent literature, often fo- 2017; Banik et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2018; Huang et al., cusing simultaneously on maximum information and mini- 2020; Khorshidi et al., 2020) have proposed a wide variety of mum dependence between the chosen locations for data col- different optimization objectives. Some have suggested that lection stations. We discuss these objective functions and either a multi-objective approach or a single objective de- conclude that a single-objective optimization of joint entropy rived from multiple objectives is necessary to find an optimal suffices to maximize the collection of information for a given monitoring network. These methods were often compared to number of stations.