Water Meter Replacement Recommendation for Municipal Water Distribution Networks using Ensemble Outlier Detection Methods

Abstract

Due to their structure and usage condition, water meters face degradation, breaking, freezing, and leakage problems. There are various studies intended to determine the appropriate time to replace degraded ones. Earlier studies have used several features, such as user meteorological parameters, usage conditions, water network pressure, and structure of meters to detect failed water meters. This article proposes a recommendation framework that uses registered water consumption values as input data and provides meter replacement recommendations. This framework takes time series of registered consumption values and preprocesses them in two rounds to extract effective features. Then, multiple un-/semi-supervised outlier detection methods are applied to the processed data and assigns outlier/normal labels to them. At the final stage, a hypergraph-based ensemble method receives the labels and combines them to discover the suitable label. Due to the unavailability of ground truth labeled data for meter replacement, we compare our method with respect to its FPR and two internal metrics: Dunn index and Davies-Bouldin Index. Results of our comparative experiments show that the proposed framework detects more compact clusters with smaller variance.