Deep Learning for Water Quality Classification in Water Distribution Networks

Maintaining high water quality is the main goal for water management planning and iterative evaluation of operating policies. For effective water monitoring, it is crucial to test a vast number of drinking water samples that is time-consuming and labour-intensive. The primary objective of this study is to determine, with high accuracy, the quality of drinking water samples by machine learning classification models while keeping computation time low. This paper aims to investigate and evaluate the performance of two supervised classification algorithms, including artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) for multiclass water classification. The evaluation uses the confusion matrix that includes all metrics ratios, such as true positive, true negative, false positive, and false negative. Moreover, the overall accuracy and f1-score of the models are evaluated. The results demonstrate that ANN outperformed the SVM with an overall accuracy of 94% in comparison to SVM, which shows an overall accuracy of 89%.