Evaluation of Tree-Based Voting Algorithms in Water Quality Classification Prediction

Lili Li and Jianhui Wei ()
Additional contact information
Lili Li: School of Economics, Qingdao University, Qingdao 266071, China
Jianhui Wei: School of Economics, Qingdao University, Qingdao 266071, China

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 23, 1-25

Abstract: Accurately predicting the state of surface water quality is crucial for ensuring the sustainable use of water resources and environmental protection. This often requires a focus on the range of factors affecting water quality, such as physical and chemical parameters. Tree models, with their flexible tree-like structure and strong capability for partitioning and selecting influential water quality features, offer clear decision-making rules, making them suitable for this task. However, an individual decision tree model has limitations and cannot fully capture the complex relationships between all influencing parameters and water quality. Therefore, this study proposes a method combining ensemble tree models with voting algorithms to predict water quality classification. This study was conducted using five surface water monitoring sites in Qingdao, representing a portion of many municipal water environment monitoring stations in China, employing a single-factor determination method with stringent surface water standards. The soft voting algorithm achieved the highest accuracy of 99.91%, and the model addressed the imbalance in original water quality categories, reaching a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 99.88%. In contrast, conventional machine learning algorithms, such as logistic regression and K-nearest neighbors, achieved lower accuracies of 75.90% and 91.33%, respectively. Additionally, the model’s supervision of misclassified data demonstrated its good learning of water quality determination rules. The trained model was also transferred directly to predict water quality at 13 monitoring stations in Beijing, where it performed robustly, achieving an ensemble hard voting accuracy of 97.73% and an MCC of 96.81%. In many countries’ water environment systems, different water qualities correspond to different uses, and the magnitude of influencing parameters is directly related to water quality categories; critical parameters can even directly determine the quality category. Tree models are highly capable of handling nonlinear relationships and selecting important water quality features, allowing them to identify and exploit interactions between water quality parameters, which is especially important when multiple parameters together determine the water quality category. Therefore, there is significant motivation to develop tree model-based water quality prediction models.

Keywords: water quality; machine learning; ensemble learning; voting algorithm; tree model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/23/10634/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/23/10634/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:23:p:10634-:d:1536642

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().