Prediction of Bacterial Contamination Outbursts in Water Wells through Sparse Coding

Maintaining water quality is critical for any water distribution company. One of the major concerns in water quality assurance, is bacterial contamination in water sources. To date, bacteria growth models cannot predict with sufficient accuracy when a bacteria outburst will occur in a water well. This is partly due to the natural sparsity of the bacteria count time series, which hinders the observation of deviations from normal behavior. This precludes the application of mathematical models nor statistical quality control methods for the detection of high bacteria counts before contamination occurs. As a result, currently a future outbreak prediction is a subjective process. This research developed a new cost-effective method that capitalizes on the sparsity of the bacteria count time series. The presented method first transforms the data into its spectral representation, where it is no longer sparse. Capitalizing on the spectral representation the dimensions of the problem are reduced. Machine learning methods are then applied on the reduced representations for predicting bacteria outbursts from the bacterial counts history of a well. The results show that these tools can be implemented by the water quality engineering community to create objective, more robust, quality control techniques to ensure safer water distribution.