Improving water quality parameter prediction with multi-level linear regression model and hybrid feature selection

Abstract

Predicting and modeling the quality of water is essential to guarantee that the water is safe to drink. The chlorine content in water needs to be monitored in real-time to provide a consistent supply of drinkable water. Additionally, potassium and chlorine have a major impact on how appealing the water is, as they are important components that influence taste and odor. Therefore, to evaluate the levels of chlorine and potassium, this work presents a multivariable linear regression approach backed by a hybrid feature extraction method. To bridge the gap between the filter and wrapper approaches, a hybrid approach is used to remove unnecessary information and reduce processing time and complexity. Here the quantitative parameters, in conjunction with categorical parameters, are instrumental in enabling accurate prediction of two water quality parameters. The two developed multi-level regression (MLR) models for the prediction of potassium and chloride are useful when factors affecting water parameters fluctuate at the site level as well as over larger spatial or temporal scales giving consumers a visual representation of how each parameter influences prediction. The converged model outperforms in comparison with other machine learning algorithms with an MAE of 7.42e-15 for potassium and 3.72e-14 for chloride.