Modelling of biochemical oxygen demand from limited water quality variable by ANFIS using two partition methods

This paper aims to: (1) develop models based on adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) able to predict five-day biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5) in Ouizert reservoir; (2) demonstrate the capability of the ANFIS in the practical issues of water quality management; (3) choose the optimal combination of input variables to improve the model performance; (4) compare two ANFIS partition methods, namely subtractive clustering called ANFIS-SC and grid partitioning, called ANFIS-GP. The models were developed using experimental data which were gathered during a ten-year period, at a mean monthly time step (scale). The input data used are total inorganic nitrogen, chemical oxygen demand (COD), total dissolved solid, dissolved oxygen and phosphate; the output is five-day biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5). Results reveal that ANFIS-SC models gave a higher correlation coefficient, a lower root mean square errors (RMSE) and mean absolute errors than the corresponding ANFIS-GP models. We can conclude that ANFIS-SC has supremacy over ANFIS-GP in terms of performance criteria and prediction accuracy for BOD5 estimation. The results showed that COD is the more effective variable for BOD5 estimating than other parameters, hence COD is the major driving factor for BOD5 modelling through ANFIS.