Water is a highly complex environmental system; its
protection cannot be met by traditional methods. As a part of the
process, it is mandatory to evaluate the parameters of ground
water so as to pursue suitable treatment. These days’ data
mining algorithms have been developed to handle various
data-rich environmental problems. In data mining, several
techniques such as complex non-linear science, soft computing
techniques, clustering and association have been applied in the
domain of ground water quality assessment and evaluation in
and around Coimbatore District. In this work, the statistical
cluster analysis methods and association rule mining techniques
were used to identify the spatial distribution of different cluster
of wells having similar characteristics and determine the
relationship between different water quality variables. The water
quality assessment in Coimbatore was done using 13 parameters,
namely NO3
-
, TDS, Mg2+, Ca2+, Na+
, Cl-
, F-
, SO4
2-
, EC, pH and
Hardness including location in different sites. The main
objective of the present study is to assess the performance of
various clustering algorithms of WEKA and identify the most
suitable algorithm for clustering water quality samples. K-Mean
algorithm and centroid method of Hierarchical clustering
performed in the similar manner in clustering. In addition to
that, this study focused on identifying the water quality
parameters exceeding permissible limits that occur together
(TDS, Mg2+, SO4
2-
, EC, hardness) in the given samples using
Association Algorithms. The performance and efficiency of
different association algorithms like Apriori and Frequent
Pattern Growth algorithm was evaluated by factors like support,
confidence, lift, leverage and conviction values