Symmetric Versus Asymmetric Transformer Architectures for Spatio-Temporal Modeling in Effluent Wastewater Quality Prediction

Accurate prediction of effluent quality indicators is essential for ensuring stable operation and regulatory compliance in wastewater treatment plants. However, the inherent spatial distribution and temporal fluctuations of wastewater processes present significant challenges for modeling. In this study, we propose a dynamic multi-scale spatio-temporal Transformer (DMST-Transformer) with a symmetric architecture to enhance prediction accuracy in complex wastewater systems. Unlike conventional asymmetric designs, the DMST-Transformer extracts spatial and temporal features in parallel using a spatial graph convolutional network and a multi-scale self-attention mechanism coupled with a dynamic self-tuning module. The model is evaluated on a full-process dataset collected from a municipal wastewater treatment plant, with biochemical oxygen demand selected as the target indicator. Experimental results on test data show that the DMST-Transformer achieves a coefficient of determination of 0.93, root mean square error of 1.40 mg/L, and mean absolute percentage error of 6.61%, outperforming classical models such as linear regression, partial least squares, and graph convolutional networks, as well as advanced deep learning baselines including Transformer and ST-Transformer. Ablation studies confirm the complementary effectiveness of the spatial and temporal modules, and computational time comparisons demonstrate the model’s suitability for real-time applications. These results validate the practical potential of the DMST-Transformer for robust effluent quality monitoring in wastewater treatment plants. Future research will focus on scaling the model to larger and more diverse datasets, extending it to predict additional water quality indicators, and deploying it in real-time environmental monitoring systems to support intelligent water resource management.