Application and Sensitivity Analysis of Artificial Neural Network for Prediction of Chemical Oxygen Demand

Integrating water quality forecasting model with river restoration techniques makes river restoration more effective and efficient. This research investigates how to use the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to predict the Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) during river restoration in Wuxi city, China. Specifically, we applied a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) using ten neurons in a single hidden layer and seven input variables (Temperature, Dissolved Oxygen, Total Nitrogen, Total Phosphorus, Suspended Sediment, Transparency, and NH₃-N) to simulate COD. The modeled results have a correlation coefficient of 0.966, 0.949, and 0.890 with the observations for the raining, validation, and testing phases, respectively. When presenting the trained network to an independent data set, the ANN model still shows a good predictive capability, indicating by a correlation coefficient of 0.978, a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.628 mg/L, and a mean square error (MSE) of 0.394 mg²/L². A sensitivity analysis was further implemented to analyze the effect of each of the input variables on prediction of COD. DO, TO, and Transparency have relatively low influences on the estimate of COD, and can be removed from the input variables. The results from this study indicate that ANN models can provide satisfactory estimates of COD during the process of bacterial treatment and is a useful supportive tool for river restoration.