On the Determination of Groundwater Level using Temporal and Spatial Parameters: Advanced Machine Learning Methods

Abstract

Prediction of groundwater level is a useful tool for managing groundwater resources in the mining area. Water resources management requires identifying potential periods for groundwater drainage to prevent groundwater from entering the mine pit and reduce high costs. For this purpose, four multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network models and four cascade forward (CF) neural network models optimized with Bayesian Regularization (BR), Levenberg-Marquardt (LM), Resilient Backpropagation (RB), and Scaled Conjugate Gradient (SCG), as well as a radial basis function (RBF) neural network model and a generalized regression (GR) neural network model were developed to predict groundwater level using 1377 data point. This data set includes 12 spatial parameters divided into two categories of sediments and bedrock, and besides, 6 time series parameters have been used. Also, to determine the best models and combine them, 165 extra validation data points have been used. After identifying the best models from the three candidate models with lower average absolute relative error (AARE) value, the committee machine intelligence system (CMIS) model has been developed. The proposed CMIS model predicts groundwater level data with high accuracy with an AARE value of less than 0.11%. Also, the proposed model was compared with ten other models through graphical and statistical error analysis. The results show that the developed CMIS model performs better than other existing models in terms of precision and validity range. The relevancy factor indicates that the electrical resistivity of sediments had the highest effect on the groundwater level. Eventually, the quality of the data used was investigated both statistically and graphically, and the results show satisfactory reliability of the data used.