Online sequential extreme learning machine in river water quality (turbidity) prediction: a comparative study on different data mining approaches.

As a measure of water quality, water turbidity might be a source of water pollution in drinking water resources. Henceforth, having a reliable tool for predicting turbidity values based on common water quantity/quality measured parameters is of great importance. In the present paper, the performance of the online sequential extreme learning machine (OS‐ELM) in predicting daily values of turbidity in Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvania, is evaluated. For this purpose, in addition to the developed OS‐ELM, several data‐driven models, that is, multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPANN), the classification and regression tree (CART), the group method of data handling (GMDH) and the response surface method (RSM) have been applied. The general findings of the study confirm the superiority of the OS‐ELM model over the other applied models so that the OS‐ELM improved the averaged RMSE of the predicted values 9.1, 11.7, 20.5 and 29.3% over the MLPANN, GMDH, RSM and CART models, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]