Monitoring and prediction of water quality are essential for effective river pollution prevention and water quality management. In this study, a multi-classification model was developed to predict chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) level in rivers. A model was developed using CatBoost, a novel ensemble machine learning algorithm. The model was developed using hourly field monitoring data collected from January 1 to December 31, 2015. For model development, chl-a was classified into class 1 (Chl-a≤10 ㎍/L), class 2 (10<Chl-a≤50 ㎍/L), and class 3 (Chl-a>50 ㎍/L), where the number of data used for the model training were 27,192, 11,031, and 511, respectively. The macro averages of precision, recall, and F1-score for the three classes were 0.58, 0.58, and 0.58, respectively, while the weighted averages were 0.89, 0.90, and 0.89, for precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively. The model showed relatively poor performance for class 3 where the number of observations was much smaller compared to the other two classes. The imbalance of data distribution among the three classes was resolved by using the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) algorithm, where the number of data used for model training was evenly distributed as 26,868 for each class. The model performance was improved with the macro averages of precision, rcall, and F1-score of the three classes as 0.58, 0.70, and 0.59, respectively, while the weighted averages were 0.88, 0.84, and 0.86 after SMOTE application.