Waste management and water quality evaluation prediction in urban environments through advanced robust hybrid machine learning algorithms

Abstract

Water quality management is a crucial aspect of environmental protection, requiring the monitoring and regulation of effluent discharges into surface water bodies. This research introduces a novel approach to predicting Water Quality Evaluation (WQE) through a unique hybrid model, ABC-DWKNN-ICA, which integrates the Distance-weighted K-Nearest Neighbors (DWKNN) algorithm with the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Firefly Algorithm (FA), Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA), and Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA). Utilizing a comprehensive dataset of 1106 data points from Telangana, India, spanning 2018–2020, the study examines a range of water quality parameters, including Ground Water Level (GWL), Potential of Hydrogen (PH), Electrical Conductivity (EC), and others. The ABC-DWKNN-ICA model demonstrates exceptional performance in terms of Recall, Precision, Accuracy, and F1 Score for WQE prediction, distinguishing itself with enhanced feature selection, improved classification accuracy, robustness to noise and outliers, reduced dimensionality, and scalability to large datasets. This hybrid model represents a significant advancement over existing approaches, including traditional Hybrid Machine Learning (HML) algorithms such as ABC-DWKNN, FA-DWKNN, ICA-DWKNN, and GSA-DWKNN. By focusing on the capabilities of ABC-DWKNN-ICA rather than comparing all HML algorithms, the research highlights its superior effectiveness in water quality prediction, with performance metrics of 0.83 for Recall, 0.86 for Precision, 0.91 for Accuracy, and 0.86 for F1 Score. This study thus fills a critical research gap by demonstrating the model's value in environmental data analysis and offering promising prospects for more effective management of water resources. Additionally, feature selection, dimensionality reduction, enhanced accuracy, noise handling, and imbalanced dataset management are key advantages of the proposed model.