A Comparison of Deep Learning and Machine Learning Methods for Water Quality Prediction

Predicting water quality is essential to preserving human health and environmental sustain ability. Traditional water quality assessment methods often face scalability and real-time monitoring limitations. With accuracies of 62%, 72 %, 83 %, 69%, 63 %, 66%, 71 %, 63 %, and 64%, respectively, the current techniques utilized were Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forest Regressor, Extreme Gradient Boosting, Naive Bayes, K-nearest neighbors, Support Vector Machine, AdaBoost, and Bagging [9]. This study addresses these challenges by leveraging Adaptive Synthetic Sampling (ADASYN) to balance the dataset and evaluating model performance on datasets of 5,000 and 10,000 entries per class. A robust dataset obtained from Kaggle was used, with five models - Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN), Categorical Boosting (CatBoost), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Random Forest - evaluated and compared. The proposed methods demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy, with XGBoost achieving the highest accuracy of 95.53%, followed by Random Forest at 93.98%. This work underscores the importance of advanced machine learning techniques in addressing the limitations of traditional methods, enhancing accuracy, scalability, and adaptability in water quality prediction. These findings contribute to advancing environmental monitoring and management practices with reliable, data-driven insights.