MACLA-LSTM: A Novel Approach for Forecasting Water Demand

Abstract

Sustainable and effective management of urban water supply is a key challenge for the well-being and security of current society. Urban water supply systems have to deal with a huge amount of data, and it is difficult to develop efficient intervention mechanisms by relying on the human experience. Deep learning methods make it possible to predict water demand in real-time; however, deep learning methods have a large number of hyperparameters, and the selection of hyperparameters can easily affect the accuracy of prediction. Within this context, a novel framework of short-term water demand forecast is proposed, in which a forecasting method clouded leopard algorithm based on multiple adaptive mechanisms—long short-term memory networks (MACLA-LSTM)—is developed to improve the accuracy of water demand predictions. Specifically, LSTM networks are used to predict water demand and the MACLA is utilized to optimize the input parameters of the LSTM. The MACLA-LSTM model is evaluated on a real dataset sampled from water distribution systems. In comparison with other methods, the MACLA-LSTM achieved MAE values of 1.12, 0.89, and 1.09; MSE values of 2.22, 1.21, and 2.38; and R2 values of 99.51%, 99.44%, and 99.01%. The results show the potential of the MACLA-LSTM model for water demand forecasting tasks and also demonstrate the positive effect of the MACLA on forecasting tasks by comparing results with LSTM variant models. The proposed MACLA-LSTM can provide a resilient, sustainable, and low-cost management strategy for water supply systems.