Application of artificial neural networks to predict total dissolved solids in the river Zayanderud, Iran

An Artificial Neural Network including a Radial Basis Function (RBF) and a Time Delay Neural Network (TDNN) was used to predict total dissolved solid (TDS) in the river Zayanderud. Water quality parameters in the river for ten years, 2001-2010, were prepared from data monitored by the Isfahan Regional Water Authority. A factor analysis was applied to select the inputs of water quality parameters, which obtained total hardness, bicarbonate, chloride and calcium. Input data to the neural networks were pH, $Na^+$, $Mg^{2+}$, Carbonate ($CO{_3}^{-2}$), $HCO{_3}^{-1}$, $Cl^-$, $Ca^{2+}$ and Total hardness. For learning process 5-fold cross validation were applied. In the best situation, the TDNN contained 2 hidden layers of 15 neurons in each of the layers and the RBF had one hidden layer with 100 neurons. The Mean Squared Error and the Mean Bias Error for the TDNN during the training process were 0.0006 and 0.0603 and for the RBF neural network the mentioned errors were 0.0001 and 0.0006, respectively. In the RBF, the coefficient of determination ($R^2$) and the index of agreement (IA) between the observed data and predicted data were 0.997 and 0.999, respectively. In the TDNN, the $R^2$ and the IA between the actual and predicted data were 0.957 and 0.985, respectively. The results of sensitivity illustrated that $Ca^{2+}$ and $SO{_4}^{2-}$ parameters had the highest effect on the TDS prediction.