Assessment of Water Quality Using Grey Relational Analysis and Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates the comprehensive assessment of water quality, which is generally a multi-attribute assessment problem. In this context, the grey relational analysis is adopted to settle the no uniformity problem of water quality attributes. The principal component analysis is applied to calculate the weighting values corresponding to various attributes of water quality so that their relative importance can be properly and objectively described. Results of study reveal that grey relational analysis coupled with principal component analysis can effectively solve the multi-attribute water quality assessment. The method is universal and can be a useful tool to improve the comprehensive assessment of water quality.