A new wavelet conjunction approach for estimation of relative humidity: wavelet principal component analysis combined with ANN

Drought Forecasting: A Review and Assessment of the Hybrid Techniques and Data Pre-Processing

Drought is a prolonged period of low precipitation that negatively impacts agriculture, animals, and people. Over the last decades, gradual changes in drought indices have been observed. Therefore, understanding and forecasting drought is essential to avoid its economic impacts and appropriate water resource planning and management. This paper presents a recent literature review, including a brief description of data pre-processing, data-driven modelling strategies (i.e., univariate or multivariate), machine learning algorithms (i.e., advantages and disadvantages), hybrid models, and performance metrics. Combining various prediction methods to create efficient hybrid models has become the most popular use in recent years. Accordingly, hybrid models have been increasingly used for predicting drought. As such, these models will be extensively reviewed, including preprocessing-based hybrid models, parameter optimisation-based hybrid models, and hybridisation of components combination-based with preprocessing-based hybrid models. In addition, using statistical criteria, such as RMSE, MAE, NSE, MPE, SI, BIC, AIC, and AAD, is essential to evaluate the performance of the models.

Hybridised Artificial Neural Network Model with Slime Mould Algorithm: A Novel Methodology for Prediction of Urban Stochastic Water Demand

Urban water demand prediction based on climate change is always challenging for water utilities because of the uncertainty that results from a sudden rise in water demand due to stochastic patterns of climatic factors. For this purpose, a novel combined methodology including, firstly, data pre-processing techniques were employed to decompose the time series of water and climatic factors by using empirical mode decomposition and identifying the best model input via tolerance to avoid multi-collinearity. Second, the artificial neural network (ANN) model was optimised by an up-to-date slime mould algorithm (SMA-ANN) to predict the medium term of the stochastic signal of monthly urban water demand. Ten climatic factors over 16 years were used to simulate the stochastic signal of water demand. The results reveal that SMA outperforms a multi-verse optimiser and backtracking search algorithm based on error scale. The performance of the hybrid model SMA-ANN is better than ANN (stand-alone) based on the range of statistical criteria. Generally, this methodology yields accurate results with a coefficient of determination of 0.9 and a mean absolute relative error of 0.001. This study can assist local water managers to efficiently manage the present water system and plan extensions to accommodate the increasing water demand.

Urban Water Demand Prediction for a City That Suffers from Climate Change and Population Growth: Gauteng Province Case Study

The proper management of a municipal water system is essential to sustain cities and support the water security of societies. Urban water estimating has always been a challenging task for managers of water utilities and policymakers. This paper applies a novel methodology that includes data pre-processing and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) optimized with the Backtracking Search Algorithm (BSA-ANN) to estimate monthly water demand in relation to previous water consumption. Historical data of monthly water consumption in the Gauteng Province, South Africa, for the period 2007–2016, were selected for the creation and evaluation of the methodology. Data pre-processing techniques played a crucial role in the enhancing of the quality of the data before creating the prediction model. The BSA-ANN model yielded the best result with a root mean square error and a coefficient of efficiency of 0.0099 mega liters and 0.979, respectively. Moreover, it proved more efficient and reliable than the Crow Search Algorithm (CSA-ANN), based on the scale of error. Overall, this paper presents a new application for the hybrid model BSA-ANN that can be successfully used to predict water demand with high accuracy, in a city that heavily suffers from the impact of climate change and population growth.

A Novel Methodology for Prediction Urban Water Demand by Wavelet Denoising and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System Approach

Accurate and reliable urban water demand prediction is imperative for providing the basis to design, operate, and manage water system, especially under the scarcity of the natural water resources. A new methodology combining discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is proposed to predict monthly urban water demand based on several intervals of historical water consumption. This ANFIS model is evaluated against a hybrid crow search algorithm and artificial neural network (CSA-ANN), since these methods have been successfully used recently to tackle a range of engineering optimization problems. The study outcomes reveal that (1) data preprocessing is essential for denoising raw time series and choosing the model inputs to render the highest model performance; (2) both methodologies, ANFIS and CSA-ANN, are statistically equivalent and capable of accurately predicting monthly urban water demand with high accuracy based on several statistical metric measures such as coefficient of efficiency (0.974, 0.971, respectively). This study could help policymakers to manage extensions of urban water system in response to the increasing demand with low risk related to a decision.