Predicting water quality through daily concentration of dissolved oxygen using improved artificial intelligence

As an important hydrological parameter, dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration is a well-accepted indicator of water quality. This study deals with introducing and evaluating four novel integrative methods for the prediction of DO. To this end, teaching–learning-based optimization (TLBO), sine cosine algorithm, water cycle algorithm (WCA), and electromagnetic field optimization (EFO) are appointed to train a commonly-used predictive system, namely multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLPNN). The records of a USGS station called Klamath River (Klamath County, Oregon) are used. First, the networks are fed by the data between October 01, 2014, and September 30, 2018. Later, their competency is assessed using the data belonging to the subsequent year (i.e., from October 01, 2018 to September 30, 2019). The reliability of all four models, as well as the superiority of the WCA-MLPNN, was revealed by mean absolute errors (MAEs of 0.9800, 1.1113, 0.9624, and 0.9783) in the training phase. The calculated Pearson correlation coefficients (R(P)s of 0.8785, 0.8587, 0.8762, and 0.8815) plus root mean square errors (RMSEs of 1.2980, 1.4493, 1.3096, and 1.2903) showed that the EFO-MLPNN and TLBO-MLPNN perform slightly better than WCA-MLPNN in the testing phase. Besides, analyzing the complexity and the optimization time pointed out the EFO-MLPNN as the most efficient tool for predicting the DO. In the end, a comparison with relevant previous literature indicated that the suggested models of this study provide accuracy improvement in machine learning-based DO modeling.