Groundwater level as an input to monthly predicting of water level using various machine learning algorithms

• Main Authors: Sapitang, Michelle, Ridwan, Wanie M., Ahmed, Ali Najah, Fai, Chow Ming, El-Shafie, Ahmed
• Format: Article
• Published: Springer Heidelberg 2021
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science; QE Geology
• Online Access: http://eprints.um.edu.my/27929/
• Institution: Universiti Malaya

Accurate prediction of the water level will help prevent overexploiting groundwater and help control water resources. On the other hand, water level predicting is a highly dynamic and non-linear process dependent on complex factors. Therefore, developing models to predict water levels to optimize water resources management in the reservoir is essential. Thus, this work recommends various supervised machine learning algorithms for predicting water levels with groundwater level correlation. The predicting models have Linear Regression (LR), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Gaussian Processes Regression (GPR), and Neural Network (NN). This study includes four scenarios; The first scenario (SC1) uses lag 1; second scenario (SC2) uses lag 1 and lag 2; third scenario (SC3) uses lag 1, lag 2, and lag 11 and the fourth scenario (SC4) uses lag 1, lag 2, lag 11 and lag 12. These scenarios have been determined using the autocorrelation function (ACF), and these lags represent the month. The results showed that for SC1, SC2, and SC4, all model performance in GPR gave good results where the highest R equal to 0.71 in SC1, 0.78 in SC2, and 0.73 in SC4 using the Matern 5/2 GPR model. For SC3, the Stepwise LR model gave a better result with an R of 0.79. It can be concluded that Matern 5/2 of Gaussian Processes Regression Models is a reliable model to predict water level as the method gave a high performance in each scenario (except SC3) with a relatively fastest training time. The NN model had the worst performance to the other three models since it has the highest MAE values, RMSE, and lowest value of R in almost all four scenarios of input combinations. These results obtained in this study serves as an excellent benchmark for future water level prediction using the GPR and LR with four scenarios created.