Analysis of Driving Factors and Trend Prediction of Groundwater Levels in the West Liao River Basin Based on the STL-LSTM Model

In the ecologically fragile West Liao River Basin, characterizing groundwater dynamics is crucial for sustainable water management. Using 2000–2016 groundwater level data, this study applies Seasonal-Trend decomposition using Loess (STL) and change-point detection to analyse trends. Driving factors are quantified via random forest combined with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis, and a novel STL–Long Short-Term Memory (STL-LSTM) hybrid model is developed for forecasting. Key findings include: (1) Groundwater levels declined persistently, with a significant change point in 2009. The post-2009 decline rate accelerated to −0.749 m/yr, a 55.7% increase. (2) Statistical attribution reveals that soil moisture (43.5%) and climatic factors (29.0%) are the primary predictors of groundwater variability. The dominance of soil moisture highlights the key role of agricultural irrigation, which strongly modifies soil water dynamics during the growing season. (3) The STL-LSTM model achieves optimal predictive performance (R2 = 0.8805, RMSE = 0.7081 m), demonstrating enhanced accuracy for non-stationary sequences. This integrated framework combines trend diagnosis, driver interpretation, and hybrid modelling, offering scientific support for precise groundwater management in semi-arid agricultural basins.