Groundwater Level Prediction Model Using Correlation and Difference Mechanisms Based on Boreholes Data for Sustainable Hydraulic Resource Management

Abstract

Drilling data for groundwater extraction incur changes over time due to variations in hydrogeological and weather conditions. At any time, if there is a need to deploy a change in drilling operations, drilling companies keep monitoring the time-series drilling data to make sure it is not introducing any changes or new errors. Therefore, a solution is needed to predict groundwater levels (GWL) and detect a change in boreholes data to improve drilling efficiency. The proposed study presents an ensemble GWL prediction (E-GWLP) model using boosting and bagging models based on stacking techniques to predict GWL for enhancing hydraulic resource management and planning. The proposed research study consists of two modules; descriptive analysis of boreholes data and GWL prediction model using ensemble model based on stacking. First, descriptive analysis techniques, such as correlation analysis and difference mechanisms, are applied to investigate boreholes log data for extracting underlying characteristics, which is critical for enhancing hydraulic resource management. Second, an ensemble prediction model is developed based on multiple hydrological patterns using robust machine learning (ML) techniques to predict GWL for enhancing drilling efficiency and water resource management. The architecture of the proposed ensemble model involves three boosting algorithms as base models (level-0) and a bagging algorithm as a meta-model that combines the base models predictions (level-1). The base models consist of the following boosting algorithms; eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting (GB). The meta-model includes Random Forest (RF) as a bagging algorithm referred to as a level-1 model. Furthermore, different evaluation metrics are used, including mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), and root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and R2 score. The performance of the proposed E-GWLP model is compared with existing ensemble and baseline models. The experimental results reveal that the proposed model performed accurately in respect of MAE, MSE, and RMSE of 0.340, 0.564, and 0.751, respectively. The MAPE and R2 score of our proposed approach is 12.658 and 0.976, respectively, which signifies the importance of our work. Moreover, experimental results suggest that E-GWLP model is suitable for sustainable water resource management and improves reservoir engineering.