Water Quality Predictive Analytics Using an Artificial Neural Network with a Graphical User Interface

Abstract

Since clean water is well known as one of the crucial sources that all living things need in their daily lives, the demand for clean freshwater nowadays has increased. However, water quality is slowly deteriorating due to anthropogenic and natural sources of pollution and contamination. Therefore, this study aims to develop artificial neural network (ANN) models to predict six different water quality parameters in the Langat River, Malaysia. Moreover, an application (app) equipped with a graphical user interface (GUI) was designed and developed to conduct real-time prediction of the water quality parameters by using real-time data as inputs together with the ANN models. As for the results, all of the ANN models achieved high coefficients of determination (R2), which were between 0.9906 and 0.9998, as well as between 0.8797 and 0.9972 for training and testing datasets, respectively. The developed app successfully predicted the outcome based on the run models. The implementation of a GUI-based app in this study enables a simpler and more trouble-free workflow in predicting water quality parameters. By eliminating sophisticated programming subroutines, the prediction process becomes accessible to more people, especially on-site operators and trainees.