A Water Demand Forecasting Model Based on Generative Adversarial Networks and Multivariate Feature Fusion

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Accurate long-term water demand forecasting is beneficial to the sustainable development and management of cities. However, the randomness and nonlinear nature of water demand bring great challenges to accurate long-term water demand forecasting. For accurate long-term water demand forecasting, the models currently in use demand the input of extensive datasets, leading to increased costs for data gathering and higher barriers to entry for predictive projects. This situation underscores the pressing need for an effective forecasting method that can operate with a smaller dataset, making long-term water demand predictions more feasible and economically sensible. This study proposes a framework to delineate and analyze long-term water demand patterns. A forecasting model based on generative adversarial networks and multivariate feature fusion (the water demand forecast-mixer, WDF-mixer) is designed to generate synthetic data, and a gradient constraint is introduced to overcome the problem of overfitting. A multi-feature fusion method based on temporal and channel features is then derived, where a multi-layer perceptron is used to capture temporal dependencies and non-negative matrix decomposition is applied to obtain channel dependencies. After that, an attention layer receives all those features associated with the water demand forecasting, guiding the model to focus on important features and representing correlations across them. Finally, a fully connected network is constructed to improve the modeling efficiency and output the forecasting results. This approach was applied to real-world datasets. Our experimental results on four water demand datasets show that the proposed WDF-mixer model can achieve high forecasting accuracy and robustness. In comparison to the suboptimal models, the method introduced in this study demonstrated a notable enhancement, with a 62.61% reduction in the MSE, a 46.85% decrease in the MAE, and a 69.15% improve in the R2 score. This research could support decision makers in reducing uncertainty and increasing the quality of water resource planning and management.