Novel two-stage hybrid paradigm combining data pre-processing approaches to predict biochemical oxygen demand concentration

Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) concentration, one of important water quality indicators, is treated as the measuring item for the ecological chapter in lakes and rivers. This investigation employed novel two-stage hybrid paradigm (i.e., wavelet-based gated recurrent unit, wavelet-based generalized regression neural networks, and wavelet-based random forests) to predict BOD concentration in the Dosan and Hwangji stations, South Korea. These models were assessed with the corresponding independent models (i.e., gated recurrent unit, generalized regression neural networks, and random forests). Diverse water quality and quantity indicators were implemented for developing independent and two-stage hybrid models based on several input combinations (i.e., Divisions 1-5). The addressed models were evaluated using three statistical indices including the root mean square error (RMSE), Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), and correlation coefficient (CC). It can be found from results that the two-stage hybrid models cannot always enhance the predictive precision of independent models confidently. Results showed that the DWT-RF5 (RMSE = 0.108 mg/L) model provided more accurate prediction of BOD concentration compared to other optimal models in Dosan station, and the DWT-GRNN4 (RMSE = 0.132 mg/L) model was the best for predicting BOD concentration in Hwangji station, South Korea.