Exploring Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Groundwater Quality Assessment

Purushottam Agrawal,Srinivas Pasupuleti,Vasanta Govind Kumar Villuri,Rajesh Dwivedi,Vijaya Vardhan Reddy Dera,Ankit Agarwal,Satish Kumar,Jitendra Sinha,Ashes Banerjee,Alok Sinha,Chandra Sekhara Rao Annavarapu

doi:10.3390/w13091172

Abstract

Freshwater quality and quantity are some of the fundamental requirements for sustaining human life and civilization. The Water Quality Index is the most extensively used parameter for determining water quality worldwide. However, the traditional approach for the calculation of the WQI is often complex and time consuming since it requires handling large data sets and involves the calculation of several subindices. We investigated the performance of artificial intelligence techniques, including particle swarm optimization (PSO), a naive Bayes classifier (NBC), and a support vector machine (SVM), for predicting the water quality index. We used an SVM and NBC for prediction, in conjunction with PSO for optimization. To validate the obtained results, groundwater water quality parameters and their corresponding water quality indices were found for water collected from the Pindrawan tank area in Chhattisgarh, India. Our results show that PSO–NBC provided a 92.8% prediction accuracy of the WQI indices, whereas the PSO–SVM accuracy was 77.60%. The study’s outcomes further suggest that ensemble machine learning (ML) algorithms can be used to estimate and predict the Water Quality Index with significant accuracy. Thus, the proposed framework can be directly used for the prediction of the WQI using the measured field parameters while saving significant time and effort.

Highlights

A high enough quantity and appropriate quality of freshwater are some of the fundamental requirements for sustaining human life and civilization
The concentration, distribution, and impact of different physicochemical parameters observed from water samples collected from the Pindarwan tank area are discussed
The ranges of concentrations observed for various parameters and the percentages of total samples exceeding the prescribed limit are presented in Table 3, along with their undesirable effect on groundwater quality and human physiology

Summary

Introduction

A high enough quantity and appropriate quality of freshwater are some of the fundamental requirements for sustaining human life and civilization. The tremendous population growth and miraculous achievements in science and technology have increased groundwater utilization for domestic, industrial, and irrigation purposes multiple folds throughout the world over the last few decades. Overexploitation, and unscientific waste disposal have influenced the accessibility and quality of groundwater. Excessive population growth and rapid urbanization have forced the use of chemicals and pesticides for agricultural purposes, which often results in leaching and mixing into the groundwater. As indicated by the World Health Organization (WHO), inappropriate or polluted water causes around 80% of all diseases in human beings. Contaminated groundwater quality cannot be improved or re-established by preventing contamination from the source. Understanding and determining water quality is imperative in the study of water resources and environmental engineering

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