Artificial neural network modeling for predicting the quality of water in the Sabak Bernam River

Abstract

Water quality prediction is aided by environmental monitoring, ecological sustainability, and aquaculture. Traditional prediction approaches capture the nonlinearity and non-stationarity of water quality well. Due to their rapid progress, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have become a hotspot in water quality prediction in recent years. ANNs are utilised in this study to predict water quality using soft computing techniques. The feedforward network and the standard back-propagation method of Levenberg-Marquardt and scaled conjugate gradient learning algorithm were employed in this research. One hidden layer has been recommended for the modelling, with the number of hidden neurons set at 3, 24, and 49. For this analysis, six different testing percentages were used, and the output data can be categorised as '0' for clean water and '1' for polluted water. From the results, it can be shown that the most optimised model was from the model of trainlm with a testing percentage of 18% and with 3 number of neurons. This most optimised model obtains an accuracy of 91.7%, the best validation performance of 0.073346 with 24 epochs, and having a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve that is closer to the true positive rate compared to other samples.