PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THREE PATTERN CLASSIFICATION TECHNIQUES USED FOR WATER QUALITY MONITORING.

Water quality is one of the major concerns of countries around the world. Monitoring of water quality is becoming more and more interesting because of its effects on human life. The control of risks in the factories that produce and distribute water ensures the quality of this vital resource. Many techniques were developed in order to improve this process attending to rigorous follow-ups of the water quality. In this paper, we present a comparative study of the performance of three techniques resulting from the field of the artificial intelligence namely: Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), RBF Neural Networks (RBF-NN), and Support Vector Machines (SVM). Developed from the statistical learning theory, these methods display optimal training performances and generalization in many fields of application, among others the field of pattern recognition. In order to evaluate their performances regarding the recognition rate, training time, and robustness, a simulation using generated and real data is carried out. To validate their functionalities, an application performed on real data is presented. Applied as a classification tool, the technique selected should ensure, within a multisensor monitoring system, a direct and quasi permanent control of water quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]