A hybrid model of ARIMA and MLP with a Grasshopper optimization algorithm for time series forecasting of water quality

Water quality monitoring of rivers is necessary in order to properly manage their basins so that steps can be taken to control the amount of pollutants and bring them to the allowable level. The ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) model does not consider nonlinear patterns in modeling water quality components. Also, in modeling using the MLP (Multilayer Perceptrons) model, both linear and nonlinear pattern are not controlled equally. Therefore, in the present study, linear time series models (ARIMA), MLP model, and a hybrid model of MLP and ARIMA optimized by a Grasshopper optimization algorithm are used to predict water quality components in the statistical period of 2011-2019. In the proposed hybrid method, the ability of the ARIMA and the MLP model are exploited. Observational water quality data for forecasting time series in the hybrid method include dissolved oxygen, water temperature, and boron over 108 months. Since, the hybrid model is capable of realizing the nonlinear essence of complicated time series, it makes more reliable forecasts. In the hybrid model, the correlation coefficients between the observational data and the predicted values are 0.9 for dissolved oxygen, 0.91 for water temperature, and 0.91 for boron. To compare the three ARIMA, MLP, and hybrid models, the accuracy indices of each model are calculated. The results show that the hybrid model's higher accuracy compared with the other two models.