Water-Quality Prediction Based on H₂O AutoML and Explainable AI Techniques

Abstract

Rapid expansion of the world’s population has negatively impacted the environment, notably water quality. As a result, water-quality prediction has arisen as a hot issue during the last decade. Existing techniques fall short in terms of good accuracy. Furthermore, presently, the dataset available for analysis contains missing values; these missing values have a significant effect on the performance of the classifiers. An automated system for water-quality prediction that deals with the missing values efficiently and achieves good accuracy for water-quality prediction is proposed in this study. To handle the accuracy problem, this study makes use of the stacked ensemble H2O AutoML model; to handle the missing values, this study makes use of the KNN imputer. Moreover, the performance of the proposed system is compared to that of seven machine learning algorithms. Experiments are performed in two scenarios: removing missing values and using the KNN imputer. The contribution of each feature regarding prediction is explained using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). Results reveal that the proposed stacked model outperforms other models with 97% accuracy, 96% precision, 99% recall, and 98% F1-score for water-quality prediction.

Keywords

• water-quality prediction
• KNN imputer
• missing values
• machine learning
• deep learning