To overcome the shortcomings of the traditional methods of water quality evaluation, in this paper, a novel model combines particle swarm optimization (PSO), chaos theory, self-adaptive strategy and back propagation artificial neural network (BP ANN) that was proposed to evaluate the water quality of Weihe River in China. An improved PSO algorithm with a self-adaptive inertia weight and a chaotic learning factor tuned by logistic function was developed and used to optimize the network parameters of BP ANN. The values of average absolute deviation (AAD), root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) and squared correlation coefficient are 0.0061, 0.0163 and 0.9903, respectively. Compared with other methods, such as BP ANN, and PSO BP ANN, the proposed model displays optimal prediction performance with high precision and good correlation. The results show that the proposed method has the good prediction ability for evaluating water quality. It is convenient, reliable and high precision, which provides good analysis and evaluation method for water quality.