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Quantity prediction of municipal solid waste (MSW) is crucial for design and programming municipal solid waste management system (MSWMS). Because effect of various parameters on MSW quantity and its high fluctuation, prediction of generated MSW is a difficult task that can lead to enormous error. The works presented here involve developing an improved support vector machine (SVM) model, which combines the principal component analysis (PCA) technique with the SVM to forecast the weekly generated waste of Mashhad city. In this study, the PCA technique was first used to reduce and orthogonalize the original input variables (data). Then these treated data were used as new input variables in SVM model. This improved model was evaluated by using weekly time series of waste generation (WG) and the number of trucks that carry waste in week of t. These data have been collected from 2005 to 2008. By comparing the predicted WG with the observed data, the effectiveness of the proposed model was verified. Therefore, in authors' opinion, the model presented in this article is a potential tool for predicting WG and has advantages over the traditional SVM model.

No abstract

This study presents a new approach—preprocessing for reaching the stationary chain in time series—to unravel the interpolating problem of artificial neural networks (ANN) for long‐term prediction of solid waste generation (SWG). To evaluate the accuracy of the prediction by ANN, comparison between the results of the multivariate regression model and ANN is performed. Monthly time series datasets, by the yrs 2000–2010, for the city of Mashhad, are used to simulate the generated solid waste. Different socioeconomic and environmental factors are assessed, and the most effective ones are used as input variables. The projections of these explanatory variables are used in the estimated model to predict the generated solid waste values through the yr 2032. Ultimately, various structures of ANN models are examined to select the best result based on the performance indices criteria. Research findings clearly indicate that such a new approach can be a practical method for long‐term prediction by ANNs. Furthermore, it can reduce uncertainties and lead to noticeable increase in the accuracy of the long‐term forecasting. Results indicate that multilayer perception approach has more advantages in comparison with traditional methods in predicting the municipal SWG. © 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 2011

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