0
Article ? AI-assigned paper type based on the abstract. Classification may not be perfect — flag errors using the feedback button. Tier 2 ? Original research — experimental, observational, or case-control study. Direct primary evidence. Sign in to save

Reliable water quality prediction and parametric analysis using explainable AI models

Scientific Reports 2024 103 citations ? Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count. Score: 65 ? 0–100 AI score estimating relevance to the microplastics field. Papers below 30 are filtered from public browse.
M. K. Nallakaruppan, E. Gangadevi, M. Lawanya Shri, Balamurugan Balusamy, Sweta Bhattacharya, Shitharth Selvarajan

Summary

Researchers applied machine learning and explainable AI (XAI) models to predict water quality and identify which contaminants — such as dissolved solids, lead, and arsenic — most affect whether water is safe to drink. A Random Forest model achieved near-perfect accuracy, and the XAI tools provided transparent explanations for each prediction, making the system useful for water safety monitoring.

The consumption of water constitutes the physical health of most of the living species and hence management of its purity and quality is extremely essential as contaminated water has to potential to create adverse health and environmental consequences. This creates the dire necessity to measure, control and monitor the quality of water. The primary contaminant present in water is Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), which is hard to filter out. There are various substances apart from mere solids such as potassium, sodium, chlorides, lead, nitrate, cadmium, arsenic and other pollutants. The proposed work aims to provide the automation of water quality estimation through Artificial Intelligence and uses Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for the explanation of the most significant parameters contributing towards the potability of water and the estimation of the impurities. XAI has the transparency and justifiability as a white-box model since the Machine Learning (ML) model is black-box and unable to describe the reasoning behind the ML classification. The proposed work uses various ML models such as Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Gaussian Naive Bayes, Decision Tree (DT) and Random Forest (RF) to classify whether the water is drinkable. The various representations of XAI such as force plot, test patch, summary plot, dependency plot and decision plot generated in SHAPELY explainer explain the significant features, prediction score, feature importance and justification behind the water quality estimation. The RF classifier is selected for the explanation and yields optimum Accuracy and F1-Score of 0.9999, with Precision and Re-call of 0.9997 and 0.998 respectively. Thus, the work is an exploratory analysis of the estimation and management of water quality with indicators associated with their significance. This work is an emerging research at present with a vision of addressing the water quality for the future as well.

Sign in to start a discussion.

More Papers Like This

Article Tier 2

Drinking water potability prediction using machine learning approaches: a case study of Indian rivers

Researchers applied machine learning techniques to predict drinking water quality in Indian rivers based on key parameters like pH, dissolved oxygen, and bacterial counts. Their models achieved high accuracy in classifying water as potable or non-potable. The study demonstrates how data-driven approaches could help developing countries monitor water safety more efficiently, especially in regions where traditional testing infrastructure is limited.

Article Tier 2

Decoding the transport thresholds of emerging contaminants in watersheds using explainable machine learning

Researchers collected 517 water samples from the Huangshui River over four years and used an explainable machine learning framework with SHAP analysis to model how land use, landscape metrics, and climate variables drive the transport of microplastics, antibiotics, and heavy metals through the watershed.

Article Tier 2

Water Quality Monitoring And Ground Water Level Prediction Using Machine Learning

Researchers applied machine learning techniques to water quality monitoring and groundwater level prediction, demonstrating the potential of data-driven approaches for environmental sensing and resource management.

Systematic Review Tier 1

Machine Learning to Access and Ensure Safe Drinking Water Supply: A Systematic Review

This systematic review examines machine learning applications for monitoring, predicting, and controlling drinking water quality, covering contaminants from disinfection byproducts to biofilms and antimicrobial resistance genes. While not specifically about microplastics, the ML approaches described are directly applicable to detecting and predicting microplastic contamination in engineered water systems.

Systematic Review Tier 1

Machine Learning to Access and Ensure Safe Drinking Water Supply: A Systematic Review

This systematic review found that machine learning techniques can effectively monitor, predict, and control drinking water quality across engineered water systems. The applications span detection of physical, chemical, and microbiological contaminants, offering a scalable alternative to labor-intensive traditional methods for ensuring safe drinking water and identifying emerging pollutants like microplastics.

Share this paper