A data-driven model for real-time water quality prediction and early warning by an integration method

Due to increasingly serious deterioration of surface water quality, effective water quality prediction technique for real-time early warning is essential to guarantee the emergency response ability in advance for sustainable water management. In this study, an effective data-driven model for surface water quality prediction is developed to analyze the inherent water quality variation tendencies and provide real-time early warnings according to the historical observation data. The developed data-driven model is integrated by an improved genetic algorithm (IGA) for selecting optimal initial weight parameters of neural a network and a back-propagation neural network (BPNN) for adjusting appropriate connection architectures of neural network. First, improved genetic algorithm is used to optimize the reasonable initial weight parameters and prevent the developed model from selecting a local optimal result. Second, BPNN is applied to adjust appropriate connection architectures and identify the features of water quality variation. The developed model is then applied to forecast the surface water quality variations for real-time early warning in Ashi River, China, comparing with simple BPNN model. The prediction results demonstrate that the developed data-driven model can significantly improve the prediction performance both in prediction accuracy and reliability, and effectively provide real-time early warning for emergency response.