Author's Personal Copy

Environmental Science and Pollution Research

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13875-w

RESEARCH IN ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE AND INNOVATION

Water quality assessment of a river using deep learning Bi-LSTM

methodology: forecasting and validation
Sakshi Khullar 1 & Nanhey Singh 2

Received: 9 October 2020 / Accepted: 6 April 2021

# The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021

Abstract
Water is a prime necessity for the survival and sustenance of all living beings. Over the past few years, the water quality
of rivers is adversely affected due to harmful wastes and pollutants. This ever-increasing water pollution is a big matter
of concern as it deteriorating the water quality, making it unfit for any type of use. Recently, water quality modelling
using machine learning techniques has generated a lot of interest and can be very beneficial in ecological and water
resources management. However, they suffer many times from high computational complexity and high prediction error.
The good performance of a deep neural network like long short-term memory network (LSTM) has been exploited for
the time-series data. In this paper, a deep learning–based Bi-LSTM model (DLBL-WQA) is introduced to forecast the
water quality factors of Yamuna River, India. The existing schemes do not perform missing value imputation and focus
only on the learning process without including a loss function pertaining to training error. The proposed model shows a
novel scheme which includes missing value imputation in the first phase, the second phase generates the feature maps
from the given input data, the third phase includes a Bi-LSTM architecture to improve the learning process, and finally,
an optimized loss function is applied to reduce the training error. Thus, the proposed model improves forecasting
accuracy. Data comprising monthly samples of different water quality factors were collected for 6 years (2013–2019)
at several locations in the Delhi region. Experimental results reveal that predicted values of the model and the actual
values were in a close agreement and could reveal a future trend. The performance of our model was compared with
various state of the art techniques like SVR, random forest, artificial neural network, LSTM, and CNN-LSTM. To check
the accuracy, metrics like root mean square errors (RMSE), the mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE),
and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) have been used. Experimental analysis is carried out by measuring the
COD and BOD levels. COD analysis reveals the MSE, RMSE, MAE, and MAPE values as 0.015, 0.117, 0.115, and
20.32, respectively, for the Palla region. Similarly, BOD analysis indicates the MSE, RMSE, MAE, and MAPE values as
0.107, 0.108, 0.124, and 18.22, respectively. A comparative analysis reveals that the proposed model outperforms all
other models in terms of the best forecasting accuracy and lowest error rates.

Keywords Water quality prediction . Deep learning . CNN . Bi-LSTM . Yamuna river

Introduction
Responsible Editor: Xianliang Yi
Water is a dire necessity in all aspects of human, environmen-
* Sakshi Khullar
tal, and social life. It is well-studied that water covers the 71%
sakshikhullar2809@gmail.com area of the earth. The groundwater is among the prime sources
of drinking water for the living of the human race. Similarly,
Nanhey Singh the rivers are also known as the important resources of natural
nsingh1973@gmail.com water (Adimalla 2019). The river water has several usages
1
such as domestic and agricultural use. Due to several signifi-
Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, West Patel Nagar, New
Delhi 110008, India
cant usages of water, it has gained the most special place
2
among all other natural resources. However, current growth
CSE, GGSIPU, AIACTR, Krishna Nagar Road Chacha Nahru Bal
Chikitsalaya, Geeta Colony, Delhi, New Delhi 110031, India
in urbanization and industrialization is responsible for
 Author's Personal Copy
producing hazardous wastes. These wastages are directly
discharged into the rivers in various forms such as metals
(copper, cadmium mercury, lead, and arsenic, etc.), organic
pollutants (hydrocarbons, pesticides, phenols, and insecti-
cides, etc.), and microbiological bacillus. These wastages have
a serious influence on the water by degrading its quality.
Water quality has a direct impact on humans’ wellbeing.
Because of the consumption of polluted water, health-related
issues and mortality rates are snowballing universally, espe-
cially in developing countries (Panaskar et al. 2016). As per
the statistics from developing countries, more than 250 M
people get infected every year, including 10–20 M die due
to diseases in developing countries (Mukate et al. 2018).
Recently, due to the lack of freshwater resources, most of
the population is using underground water for drinking, agri-
culture, and industry’s usage. The underground water is well
accepted and a reliable source of drinking water; thus, many
people depend on the groundwater resources such as hand
pumps, bore wells, and dug well for drinking purposes.
However, currently, the groundwater quality is also degrading
due to several factors such as the composition of the host rock,
the interaction between rock and water, climate change, soil
matrix, and water table depth. Moreover, India is a major
agroproducer nation that depends on the rainy water and sur-
face water resources for agriculture and drinking. Hence, con-
tinuous monitoring of water is required to manage the water
quality level for different usages. Recently, the research com-
munity presented the water quality index (WQI) as a standard
criterion to monitor the water quality according to the water
quality levels across the globe (Rahman et al. 2019). The
value of WQI ranges between 1 and 100 wherein the large
number of WQI denotes a better level of water quality.
Generally, the WQI level 80 score more denotes the clean
water and WQI score 40–80 represents the slightly polluted
water in the river, and if this score is below 40, then water is
considered polluted water. However, the continuous monitor-
ing of water can be costly and tedious. In various regions,
water quality monitoring is approximated through a time-
consuming process. This process includes several steps such
as water sample collection from the site, proper storage, and
transportation of these samples to the laboratories for testing.
The testing of these water samples requires time and expen-
sive equipment. During this process, there is enough room that
can cause error and inefficiencies in water samples. In order to
perform efficient water management, water quality forecast-
ing is considered a promising solution. For water quality fore-
casting, machine learning techniques have gained huge attrac-
tion from the research community because of their nature of
learning the water quality patterns along the time. Several
techniques have been introduced such as artificial neural net-
works (Chatterjee et al. 2017), support vector regression (Li
et al. 2017), ARIMA model (Zhang and Xin 2018) deep learn-
ing methods such as LSTM (Wang et al. 2017), Deep Bi-S-
Environ Sci Pollut Res
SRU Learning Network (Liu et al. 2020), recurrent neural
network (Li et al. 2019), and many more.
Background of water quality prediction
Water pollution is a challenging threat to the environment and
human health systems. Recently, water quality monitoring
and quality forecasting are widely adopted by organizations
in various countries. Generally, the WQ monitoring depart-
ments use six parameters to evaluate the features of water such
as pH, chemical oxygen demand (COD), ammoniacal nitro-
gen (NH3N) dissolved oxygen (DO), suspended solids (SS),
and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD). According to a
study presented in (Yahya et al. 2019), dissolved oxygen
(DO) plays an important role as it provides information about
the compound, physical and biotic characteristics of water.
For example, DO represents the existence of oxygen (O2)
molecules in terms of mg/L concentration in water. These
parameters play a significant role in water quality prediction.
As mentioned before, India is a developing country, and
the majority of the population relies on agriculture for their
living. To obtain better crop yield, the quality of the
underground and river water is an important parameter.
Several studies have been reported recently on water quality
prediction on Indian rivers. Kisi and Parmar (2016) presented
a water pollution prediction study on Yamuna River using
SVM and adaptive regression model. Here, diverse groups
of water quality characteristics are considered such as free
ammonia (AMM), total coliform (TC), total Kjeldahl nitrogen
(TKN), potential of hydrogen (pH), water temperature (WT),
and faecal coliform (FC). Kadam et al. (2019) presented an
artificial neural network (ANN) and multiple linear regression
(MLR) model for Shivganga River using the following param-
eters pH, Ca, TDS, SO4, Cl, TH, EC, Na, Mg, HCO3, K, and
NO3. Similarly, Bisht et al. (2017), authors presented a com-
parative analysis of the various combinations of decision tree–
based learning algorithms such as J48 (C4.5), random tree
(RT), Hoeffding tree, LMT (logistic model tree), and random
forest (RF).
Problem statement
The dissolved oxygen is an important factor which is widely
used for water quality forecasting. The regression methods
consider the DO data as a time-series data and provide fore-
casting. Similarly, the dynamic linear models are used in sam-
ple monitoring approach. These models use time correlation
structure to achieve the real-time forecasting which can be
useful for future periods. Maintaining reliability in water qual-
ity prediction model has become a hot research topic in water
environmental science. The drawbacks of tradition methods
are eliminated by developing improved regression models.
Moreover, the traditional methods do not consider the effect
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Environ Sci Pollut Res
of physics, chemistry, biology, meteorology, and hydraulics
factors (Liu et al. 2019). Currently, several methods are pre-
sented such as fuzzy logic and artificial neural network to
improve the performance of water quality models. Similarly,
LSTM and Bi-LSTM methods also gained huge attraction in
the field of time-series forecasting (Shahid et al. 2020). The
existing techniques fail to deal with computational complexity
for multivariate data. Moreover, in India, the river Yamuna is
considered a one of the important sources of water, since this
river passes through various states; hence, monitoring the
quality of water becomes a very important task for irrigation
and drinking water.
Contribution of the work
In this work, the main aim is to develop a reliable and auto-
mated machine learning process to monitor and predict the
water quality of Yamuna River. However, the main contribu-
tion of this work is as follows:
(a) Collection of various water samples from different sites
in Delhi region which includes several parameters to in-
dicate the pollution level of water
(b) Implementing missing value imputation model to deal
with the missing values
(c) Development of CNN model to generate a feature map
from the given input data
(d) Introducing a new bi-directional LSTM architecture for
better learning
(e) Incorporating optimization process with the help of a loss
function to minimize the training error
(f) Comparative analysis to prove the robustness of the pro-
posed model.
Article organization
The structure of the article is prepared as the following: sect.
“Literature survey” presents a brief literature review about
recent techniques of water quality prediction and forecasting
using machine learning techniques, sect. “Proposed DLBL-
WQA” presents a proposed solution for water quality predic-
tion using deep learning techniques, sect. “Results and discus-
sion” presents the detailed experimental analysis where we
evaluate the efficacy of proposed approach with prevailing
techniques and finally, and sect. “Conclusion and future
scope” presents the concluding remarks about the proposed
scheme of water quality prediction.
Literature survey
In the previous section, the need and advantages of water
quality prediction are discussed. However, conventional
methods suffer from implementation costs and require more
time to obtain the results due to their time-consuming process.
Thus, the existing techniques are not reliable for water quality
prediction. Currently, machine learning and deep learning
have gained attraction due to their significant performance
of pattern learning.
Avila et al. (2018) presented a comparative study for water
quality forecasting. This study includes several models such
as Naive Bayes (NB)–based model, MLR, Bayesian network,
dynamic regression, RT, classification tree, RF, multinomial
logistic regression, discriminant analysis, and Markov chain.
The experimental study shows that Bayesian learning
achieves better performance when compared with existing
techniques. However, these systems suffer from various
issues such as prediction accuracy; hence, scholars have
concentrated on developing machine learning models for
water quality prediction. Li et al. (2017) proposed a
regression-based method which uses ensemble empirical
mode decomposition (EEMD) and support vector regression
(SVR). The main idea is to decompose and ensemble the
dissolved oxygen into several intrinsic mode functions.
These modes are further modelled using support vector
regression. Yaseen et al. (2018) presented an enhanced form
of least square SVM integrated with a Bat algorithm
(LSSVM-BA) to predict the DO absorption to approximate
the pollution level of river water. Yasin and Karim (2020)
introduced fuzzy weighted multivariate regression analysis
to predict the water quality index. The water samples are ex-
amined based on six parameters which are pH, chemical ox-
ygen demand, ammoniacal nitrogen, dissolved oxygen,
suspended solids, and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD).
Under the machine learning paradigm, Ahmed et al. (2019)
proposed supervised machine learning–based models using
four parameters, namely, temperature, turbidity, pH, and
total dissolved solids. In this work, several techniques are
tested. The experimental study shows that the gradient
boosting algorithm achieves better performance. Lu and Ma
(2020) introduced a hybrid decision tree model for short-term
water quality prediction. Huang et al. (2018) introduced a
hybrid model using genetic algorithm, neural network, fuzzy
logic, and wavelet transform. The fuzzy rules are approximat-
ed using self-adaptive fuzzy c-mean clustering.
Liao and Zhao (2016) focused on dissolved oxygen for
water quality prediction and proposed a combined model
using principal component analysis (PCA), fuzzy neural net-
work (FNN), and differential evolution combined with BP
algorithm (DEBP). The PCA helps to minimize the dimen-
sions of the input data vector and differential evolution
algorithm. Wang et al. (2017) presented a deep learning–
based method using LSTM (long- and short-term memory)
neural network. The LSTM NN model is established for pre-
diction; later, training data is collected from Taihu Lake, and
finally, suitable parameters are selected to improve the
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accuracy of neural networks. WQ prediction is a tedious task
because the water parameter quality parameters are non-linear,
dynamic, changeable, and complex. Due to these parameters,
traditional forecasting methods suffer from poor accuracy and
higher computational complexity issues. To overcome these
issues, Hu et al. (2019) introduced a deep LSTM network for
water quality prediction in the mariculture environment. First
of all, data pre-processing methods such as linear interpola-
tion, smoothing, filtering, and denoizing methods are applied
to correct the collected water quality data. Later, Pearson’s
correlation coefficient is computed to find the relativity be-
tween pH, temperature, and other features. Finally, a
prediction model is established to forecast water quality.
Similarly, Li et al. (2019) used recurrent neural networks for
WQ prediction. The conventional recurrent NN models use a
single shallow model that is not reliable to find the
longstanding relevance between water quality parameters.
This leads to false alarms in the WQP model. To overcome
these issues, authors Li et al. (2019) introduced a combined
model using recurrent neural networks (RNN) with improved
Dempster/Shafer (D-S) evidence theory (RNNs-DS). Here,
RNN handles the long-term dependencies, and improved D-
S evidence is used to synthesize the prediction outcome of
RNN. Furthermore, an enhanced scheme is presented to ob-
tain the number of evidences using correlation analysis which
helps to reduce the uncertainty in evidence selection.
Moreover, a modified softmax function is also presented to
solve the weight allocation problem. Ye et al. (2019)
discussed the issues of dynamic non-linearity and the correla-
tion between water quality features. They use LSTM to opti-
mize the RNN architecture, and new architecture is introduced
by considering several optimal parameters such as the no. of
storage units, no. of structural layers, and adjusting the win-
dow size. Experimental results depict better prediction rates of
pollutant index with LSTM-RNN over the conventional grey
model and the RNN model.
Proposed DLBL-WQA
This study is mainly focused on forecasting the water quality
factors of rivers. The Yamuna River in the Indian region is
chosen as the study area because it is a prominent water re-
source for about five states with over fifty million people
dependent on it. This section describes the proposed solution
for water quality prediction
Yamuna River
The Yamuna River is one of the major streams of Ganga in the
north region of India. The origin point of Yamuna in
Yamunotri which is located at a height of 6387 m on
Banderpooch peaks (38°59′N 78°27′ E) in the lower region
Environ Sci Pollut Res
of the Himalayas in Uttarakhand (India). It travels a total of
1376 km while passing through various states such as
Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi.
Yamuna River supplies more than 70% of water to Delhi
and around 57 million people depend on the Yamuna river
water for daily usage (Parmar and Bhardwaj 2014). Table 1
presents the total catchment of the Yamuna River.
In this work, the Delhi stretch of the Yamuna River is
considered. Water samples from various regions such as
Palla (23-km upstream near flood control office),
Nizamuddin Bridge (29-km downstream Palla), Agra Canal
at Kalindi Kunj, Okhla (39-km downstream Palla), and Agra
canal at Badarpur were collected. Below given Fig. 1 shows
the graphical representation of the considered study area.
The collected samples comprise of nine different parame-
ters such as water temperature (WT), DO, pH, free ammonia
(AMM), COD, BOD, faecal coliform (TC), faecal coliform
(FC), and conductivity (COND). Below given Table 2 pre-
sents a brief description of these parameters.
Methodology
This section describes the proposed solution for water quality
prediction using deep learning techniques. Firstly, several
state-of-art models for time-series forecasting is discussed.
Forecasting methods
In this subsection, a brief description of forecasting models
like support vector regression, artificial neural network, ran-
dom forest, and deep learning methods is given.
SVR Support vector machine is a machine learning technique
that is established on the concept of statistical learning theory.
SVR is a kind of SVM that is widely adopted in time-series
prediction applications such as weather forecasting, load fore-
casting, and fault prediction. Wang et al. used support vector
regression and presented a hybrid structure (WA-PSO-SVR)
based on wavelet analysis (WA) coupled with support vector
regression (SVR) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The
SVR is used to monitor the levels of COD, DO, and
Table 1 The catchment of Yamuna River
State Total area (Sq. Km.) % Contribution
Rajasthan 102,883 29.80%
UP and Uttaranchal 74,208 21.50%
Haryana 21,265 6.50%
Madhya Pradesh 14,028 40.60%
Himachal Pradesh 5799 1.6%
Delhi 1485 0.4%
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Environ Sci Pollut Res

Fig. 1 Yamuna River in Delhi

region

ammonia–nitrogen in river water. Similarly, the SVR is also the bias. W and b are realized as an optimization problem, and
used for water temperature monitoring (Quan et al. 2020). their solution can be obtained as:
Thus, the SVR can be applied for water quality forecasting.
1 N

This work adopts the SVR model for Yamuna river water kW k2 þ C ∑ εi þ ε*i ð3Þ
quality monitoring. Let us consider a time-series data given as: 2 i¼1

D ¼ fðX i ; yi Þg; where 1 ≤ i ≤ N ð1Þ Subject to:

where Xi is the input vector at time stamp i which contains m yi −W T ðϕðxÞÞ−b ≤ ζ þ ϵ i

elements, and yi is the resultant value. Thus, the regression W T ðϕðxÞÞ þ b−yi ≤ ζ þ ε*i ð4Þ
formula is expressed as: ϵi ; ε*i ≥ 0

f ðX i Þ ¼ W T ϕ ðX i Þ þ b ð2Þ where ζ denotes the model threshold, C is a parameter which

denotes the relation between model simplicity and generaliza-
where W denotes the weight vector, ϕ(Xi) is used for mapping tion ability, and ϵi and ε*i represent the slack variables to
the input data to higher-dimensional features, and b denotes measure the cost of the errors.

Table 2 Water quality parameter description

Parameter Description

AMM Free ammonia is the part of ammonia that did not get mixed with chlorine and stays as NH4+ or NH3 based on the temperature and pH of
the water.
BOD It is a measurement unit of the volume of oxygen required by the microorganisms for the degradation of the organic constituents exists in
water
COD It is the overall measure of all the organic and in-organic chemicals present in the water.
DO DO is a measurement of non-compound oxygen present in the water. It has a significant control on water quality because it affects the lives
of water creatures. Very high or very low DO can have an adverse consequence on the quality of water.
TC and FC The overall coliform and faecal coliform microbes test are a major sign of “potability” and fitness measure for the ingestion of drinking
water. It indicates the blend of overall coliform bacteria and the potential existence of disease-causing germs.
pH It indicates the acidity/base level of the water. It ranges from 0 to 14, where 7 is considered neutral. Below 7 level indicates acidity, while
above 7 indicates a base.
TKN Total Kjeldahl nitrogen is a measurement unit for organic nitrogen and ammonia. TKN usually exists in the range of 35 and 60 mg/L in the
influent civic wastewater.
WT Water temperature indicates the hotness or coldness of water. It plays a significant role to determine the water quality using
oxidation–reduction potential, water density, metabolic rates, compound toxicity, conductivity, and salinity.
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Environ Sci Pollut Res

ANN The ANNs are widely adopted in various applications
such as rainfall forecasting (Unnikrishnan and Jothiprakash
2020, Samantaray et al. 2020) and electricity demand forecast-
ing (Anand and Suganthi 2020). ANN is a learning model,
motivated by the brain function and inherent nervous system.
ANN contains a hidden layer to learn the patterns; however,
the simplest ANN model can be constructed using a single-
hidden layer which is known as a single-hidden layer
feedforward neural network (SLFN). This single-layer net-
work contains an input layer, a hidden layer with an activation
function. The output of this network is computed as:
!
h Step 3: repeat this process, until the tree is grown and the full tree is
y¼g ∑ wjo v j þ b j ð5Þ
j¼1
where vj is the output of the hidden layer, which is denoted as


v j ¼ f ∑ni¼1 wij xi þ bi Þ, xi denotes the input vector to the
neuron, f(.) and g(.) represent the non-linear activation func-
tion, vj is the output of hidden layer, n denotes the total number
of features, h denotes the no. of hidden layer neurons, wij is the
weight between input variable i and neuron j of the considered
hidden layer, wjo is the weight of the connection between the
hidden layer and output, and y is the final outcome of ANN.
RF RF is a combined learning method that can be utilized for
classification and regression tasks. The random forest–based
regression scheme is also adopted in various forecasting sys-
tems (Moon et al. 2018). Generally, random forests use bag-
ging and random subspace methods for these problems.
Bagging is a widely used method in random forest models.
According to these ensemble methods, each learning model is
trained using bootstrap samples from the original training
samples, and then finally, outputs are aggregated. In the ran-
dom forest, the constructed decision tree is used where m
features are selected from a total n number of features. Later,
feature impurity criterion is applied to partition the features
along with the feature axis. Below given Table 3 shows the
algorithmic representation of the random forest algorithm.
Table 3 Random forest algorithm
Inputs:
Training dataset X with dimension N×n where N denotes the number of
observations and n represents the number of features.
Y denotes output or target values of prediction with dimension N×1.
L represents the number of trees in random forest, Ti represents the
decision tree in RF, and m represented randomly selected features in
each node of the decision tree.
Step 1: generate the training set in each decision tree Ti in the random
forest by sampling all observations.
Step 2: compute the best split criterion for decision tree Ti by using m
randomly selected features.
constructed.
Step 4: finally, aggregate the outcome of each decision tree to achieve the
final prediction result. This result can be used for classification and
regression. The final value is determined using a majority vote for
classification. However, the mean or median values from the predicted
outputs are used for regression.
Similarly, the stacked autoencoder is a type of neural net-
work which contains several layers of sparse autoencoders,
and the output layer is linked to the input layers. The encoding
of each step is expressed as:
 
aðlÞ ¼ f zðlÞ
ð6Þ
zðlþ1Þ ¼ W ðl;1Þ aðlÞ þ bðl;1Þ
Similarly, the decoding can be expressed as:
 
aðnþlÞ ¼ f zðnþlÞ
ð7Þ
zðnþlþ1Þ ¼ W ðn−l;2Þ aðnþlÞ þ bðn−l;2Þ
where a(l) denotes the activation function in layer l, z(l) is the
weighted sum of inputs for layer l, W( l, k ) denotes the weight
value and b(l, k).

Deep learning methods Deep learning (DL) algorithms have

gained immense popularity in the field of machine learn-
ing. These models use high-level features for learning with
the help of multiple non-linear transformations. Currently,
deep belief network (DBN), CNN (convolutional neural
network), and stacked autoencoders are widely used
models of DL methods. The DBN is a kind of neural net-
work which comprises of multiple hidden layers. Below
given Fig. 2 shows the architecture of deep belief net-
works. The DBN model extracts the features in an unsu-
pervised manner to extract the discriminant features. Then,
a supervised learning model can be incorporated on the top
of DBN. Fig. 2 The architecture of deep belief neural network
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Environ Sci Pollut Res
Proposed deep learning–based forecasting method
for water quality prediction
We propose a deep learning model for predicting the water
quality in the Yamuna River using regression analysis.
Generally, the forecasting problems for a regression model
can be expressed as:
y ¼ F ðx; θÞ
where x denotes the input vector and y denotes the predicted
output for the corresponding input, F is a mapping function
with parameters which are used to learn the pattern from
training samples pairs given as {(xr, yr)| r = 1, …R}. Thus,
the aim is to minimize the mean squared error (MMSE) of
prediction. This MMSE function is defined as:
1 R  
2
 identify the different locations.
ε¼ ∑ byr −yr  ð8Þ
R r¼1 2 In CNN layers, the neurons are combined by using weights
where by is the predicted output class, and y denotes the input
class. In this work, a deep neural network–based learning
technique is used to learn the parameters. Deep neural net-
work adopts feedforward neural network model which con-
tains one or more hidden units.
Missing value imputation
The Yamuna River data samples were collected from the
Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) department, Delhi.
The data had some missing values. Few data samples were not
present in June and July. Similarly, some of the FC and TC
values were missing. Sometimes, there was no water in a
particular region; for instance, there was no water in
Yamuna River in May 2016. These missing values in the data
can generate an inaccurate prediction. To avoid it, missing
value imputation by using a simple “mean” imputer is done
where missing values are identified and replaced by the mean
values of neighbouring values.
Deep Bi-LSTM network
Recurrent neural networks (RNN) play a significant role in
pattern learning. The RNN models maintain memory unit
based on the contextual information which is used for process-
ing the time-series data. However, RNNs suffer from the issue
of managing long-range dependencies due to gradients. To
overcome this, researchers have designed a long short-term
memory (LSTM) model for a pattern that solves the depen-
dency problem by using memory cells. This model contains
three multiplicative gates which help to forget and store the
information in the cell states. Below given Fig. 3 shows the
complete proposed deep Bi-LSTM model to predict the water
quality. In this work, CNN is combined with Bi-LSTM. The
input data processed through the missing value imputation
model is fed into the CNN layers. The outcome of the CNN
layer is processed through the Bi-LSTM layers, and finally,
fully connected layers generate the predicted output.
In the first module, two one-dimensional layers tailed by
two max-pooling layers are used. This combination helps to
decrease the computational complications in feature extrac-
tion. Conventional methods use MLP (multilayer perceptron)
as feature extractor which uses feedforward neural network
process, but these methods fail to attain the anticipated out-
come due to the connectivity between the perceptron. On the
other hand, CNN is known as a special type of MLP where
connectivity between other neurons is not required. These
neurons are connected to a certain region of the input data
and arranged using a certain size and stride. Here, CNN filters
are exploited which allow for parameter and weight sharing to
and biases which are learned in the training process.
According to this model, we provide several water quality
parameters as inputs to the neurons. In the next step, the dot
product operator is applied followed by a non-linearity func-
tion. This model contains a 1D convolution layer, pooling
layer, and fully connected layer. The time-series data is given
as input to CNN in the form of one-dimensional data which
are later arranged as sequential time instants. Let us consider
that the input vector is given as x = {x1, x2, x3, …xn} where x-
n ∈ R are the dataset variables. The 1D convolutional layer
d
generates a feature map as fm with the help of convolutional
operators on the input water quality data with filter w ∈ Rfd
where f denotes the inherent features. A new feature map fm
can be obtained from the previous feature map which is
expressed as:


f
hl i m ¼ tanh w f m xi:iþ f −1 þ b ð9Þ
where b denotes the bias and h ∈ Rn − f + 1, the filter hl is ap-
plied to each set of feature f in the input data as {x1 : f, x2 : f + 1,
…, xn − f + 1} which generate a feature map as hl = [hl1, hl2, …
hln − f + 1]. The output of convolution layer is obtained by
adding the weighted inputs that are compromised using
multilinear transformation. Generally, the linear transforma-
tion fails to capture the complex structure of input data hence
non-linear functions are preferred over linear functions for
better learning. This work uses ReLU activation function
which is applied to each input. Further, the output of convo-
lution layer is processed through the max-pooling layer, and
down sampling is performed i.e. we apply max-pooling layer
!
on each feature map as hl ¼ maxfhlg. This procedure helps
to select the features that are the most important. The outcome
of max-pooling layer can be expressed as:
0
xi ¼ CNNðxi Þ ð10Þ
 Author's Personal Copy
Fig. 3 Proposed DLBL-WQA network architecture
where xi denotes the input vector which contains water quality
0
parameters, and xi denotes the output of CNN model which is
later fed to the Bi-LSTM network. Further, we incorporate
LSTM architecture with forget gate structure as depicted in
below given Fig. 4.
This structure is represented as:
it ¼ σ
ðW i ð½xt ; yt−1 ÞÞ
f t ¼ σ W f ð½xt ; yt−1 Þ
ot ¼ σð
W 0 ðxt ; yt−1 ÞÞ 
ð11Þ
gt ¼ tanh W g ð½xt ; yt−1 Þ
ct ¼ f ⊙ct−1 þ i⊙g
yt ¼ o⊙tanhðct Þ
where we denote various gates such as input, forget, output,
and input modulation gates in terms of i, f, o, g, and c. σ
denotes the sigmoid function; Wi, Wf, Wo , and Wg denote
the fully connected neural network corresponding to the input,
forget, output, and input modulation gates, respectively; and
⊙ denotes the element-wise product. Generally, the conven-
tional LSTM processes one-directional sequence which leads
to reduced efficiency of LSTM, but multidirectional data may
contain valuable information. Hence, to overcome these chal-
lenges, we incorporate bi-directional LSTM which blends
both forward and backward directions in the data sequence.
Fig. 4 Bi-LSTM architecture
Environ Sci Pollut Res
The processing of data in these two directions helps to capture
each change in the information on water quality data. Let us
consider that water quality parameter sequence x has n number
of elements where LSTM considers forward direction ele-
ments as {x1, x2, x3, …xn} and backward direction as {xn, xn
− 1, xn − 2, …x1}. These elements are trained separately during
the training process and finally fused by integrating the out-
puts of the training process for each direction. This can be
expressed as:
yðt Þ ¼ y F ðt Þ⊕yB ðn−t þ 1Þ ð12Þ
where yF and yB denote the forward and backward directions,
respectively; ⊕ is used for integration operator; and y(t) is the
predicted output at time t
Optimization model for LSTM
Many times, deep learning methods suffer from learning
error-related issues which cause poor performance in classifi-
cation and forecasting. The conventional methods use a hy-
brid model by combining the CNN and LSTM linearly; how-
ever, computational complexity and parameter optimization
remain challenging tasks. To overcome this issue, an optimi-
zation module is developed to improve the learning. Reducing
the training error can significantly improve forecasting perfor-
mance. Focusing on this notion, a novel and optimized train-
ing module is presented to minimize the training error. This
can be obtained by quantifying the uncertainty of prediction
values. To solve this problem, identifying the optimal weights
for LSTM is an important task to approximate the conditional
distribution p(yi, t + k| yi, t) of predicted output. Hence, a pre-
dictive model is created to estimate the probability distribution
of the output. The network is trained to minimize the error by
adjusting the parameters to maximize the likelihood L(θ)
which is obtained for each output θ of historical observations.
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Environ Sci Pollut Res

Table 4 Delhi region water

samples Month WT DO pH AMM COD BOD COND TC FC

Palla region samples

January 11.6 10.2 7.4 NA 5 1 445 6800 -
February 16.4 8.4 8.2 1 10 2 514 110,000 -
March 24.9 9.1 8.3 0.1 8 NA 449 1300 780
Nizamuddin bridge samples
January 13.8 0.8 7.1 27.2 89 31 1590 5,400,000 5,400,000
February 17.2 3.4 8.2 3.4 23 8 514 2,200,000 1,300,000
March 23.8 0.4 8.1 6.6 26 5 686 9,200,000 2,800,000
Agra Canal at Kalindi Kunj
January 12.3 0.9 7.3 3.8 44 17 626 1,300,000 1,300,000
February 17.6 2.4 7.6 4.2 18 5 680 9,200,000 1,700,000
March 23.5 0.6 8.1 7.9 32 9 938 940,000 490,000
Okhla downstream
January 14 3.5 7.3 14.4 132 43 1333 2,400,000 94,000
February 17.5 6.1 7.6 4.8 28 7 584 790,000 490,000
March 26.5 0.7 8.0 8.8 42 12 991 1,100,000 700,000
Agara Canal at Badarpur
January 16.4 0.9 7.1 8.3 49 19 786 2,200,000 220,000
February 17.5 1.4 7.5 5.0 35 13 567 2,200,000 940,000
March 24.2 0.6 8.1 8.3 46 20 959 9,200,000 3,500,000

In other words, it minimizes the negative log likelihood, and !

the loss function can be expressed as:
 1
2 −2 ðx−μÞ2
Lg ¼ 2πσ exp − ð14Þ
2σ2


T 
E L ¼ − ∑ lnL yi;t jθðS t Þ ð13Þ
t¼t 0 where x denotes the actual measurements of dependent vari-
able, μ is the distribution, and σ is the standard deviation
Here, the Gaussian likelihood function (LG) is used which which can be obtained by softplus activation ad affine trans-
computes mean and standard deviations from previous obser- form. This can be computed as:
vations. This function is expressed as:
μðst Þ ¼ wμ st
ð15Þ
σðst Þ ¼ lnð1 þ expðwσ st ÞÞ

Table 5 Simulation parameters

where wμ represents the output weight vector of mean values,
Parameter name Value and wσ represents the weight vector of the standard deviation
of output.
Number of hidden units 250
Number of epochs 2500
Batch size 120
Training function Bayesian regularization
Results and discussion
Training ratio 70%
Learning rate 0.001
This section demonstrates the outcomes achieved for
Loss function Mean absolute error water quality forecasting of Yamuna River. Water sam-
Convolution layer activation function Tanh ples are collected from different locations in Delhi. The
Convolution layer padding Same proposed model is implemented using Python 3.7 run-
Pooling layer activatio Relu ning on Windows platform. The system has 8 GB RAM
LSTM activation Tanh with 8 GB NVIDIA graphic card and 1 TB of memory.
 Author's Personal Copy
Environ Sci Pollut Res

Table 6 Performance measurement

Parameter Computation

Mean squared error (MSE) N

MSE ¼ N1 ∑ ðyi −byi Þ 2
i¼1
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Root mean square error (RMSE) N
RMSE ¼ 1
N ∑ ðyðiÞ−byðiÞÞ 2
i¼1

Mean absolute error (MAE) N

MAE ¼ N1 ∑ jyðiÞ−b
yðiÞj
i¼1
Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) N jyðiÞ−byðiÞj
MAPE ¼ 1
N ∑ yðiÞ  100%
i¼1

where y(i) and b

yðiÞ denote the predicted value and actual value at time t in the considered time-series sequence.

Dataset details and simulation parameters Performance measurement

The dataset contains nine parameters such as WT, DO,
pH, AMM, COD, BOD, COND, TC, and FC to indicate
the water quality. These parameters are treated as attri-
butes for learning. Each attribute has 12 values; hence,
for each region, there are 108 attributes. The complete
catchment of Yamuna River is considered in five re-
gions. Therefore, a total of 540 attributes are collected
for each year data sample. Six-year (from 2013 to 2019)
water quality data is collected from the Central Pollution
Control Board (CPCB), India. Thus, we have a total
3240 attributes in the collected data. This data are col-
lected on a monthly basis survey by CPCB. Below given
Table 4 shows the sample data for 3 months in each
region.
A deep learning–based model is used for water quality
forecasting. In order to train this network, several parameters
are used which are mentioned in below given Table 5.
The proposed deep neural network model contains 250
hidden units where data is processed in batches by considering
batch size as 120. Data is divided into a ratio of 70–30% i.e.
70% data is used for training and 30% data is used for testing.
The complete data is trained using the Bayesian
Regularization training function.
Four statistical parameters are employed to evaluate the per-
formance of water quality forecasting using deep learning
techniques. These parameters are mean squared error, mean
absolute error, root mean square error, and mean absolute
percentage error (Table 6).
& MSE (mean squared error): it is a measurement of aver-
aged squared error between predicted and actual values.
Less value of MSE represents the better prediction.
& RMSE (root mean square error): the RMSE represents the
standard deviation of prediction errors.
& MAE (mean absolute error): it is a measurement of the
average magnitude of prediction errors.
& MAPE (mean absolute percentage error): it is the accuracy
of the time-series forecasting model.
These parameters can be computed as follows:
Comparative analysis
In this section, a comparative study of the proposed technique
is made with other existing techniques of water quality

Table 7 Simulation parameters of other techniques

Support vector regression Kernel = rbf, C = 1.0, gamma = “scale”

Artificial neural network Dense layers nodes = 32, 64, and 64 optimizer = “rmsprop”
Random forest n_estimators = 100, max_features = “auto,” bootstrap = true
Linear regression Default
LSTM Hidden layer LSTM nodes = 4
Activation function = sigmoid, epochs = 100, batch_size = 1, verbose = 2
CNN-LSTM Filters = 32, kernel = 2, activation function = “relu,” input_shape = (13, 1)
DLBL-WQA Filters = 32, kernel = 2, activation function = “relu,” input_shape = (13, 1), dropout = 0.25
 Author's Personal Copy
Environ Sci Pollut Res

Table 8 Palla region COD prediction performance various parameters, for example, chemical oxygen demand
Methods MSE RMSE MAE MAPE (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), conductivity,
dissolved oxygen (DO), and temperature, pH can be utilized.
Support vector regression 0.491 0.711 0.596 54.28 This section considers the Palla region water samples of 6
Artificial neural network 0.566 0.652 0.521 54.21 years. As mentioned, 70% of data for training and 30% of data
Random forest 0.487 0.568 0.614 53.24 for testing are used. According to the proposed model, firstly,
Linear regression 0.401 0.480 0.556 51.29 missing value imputation method is applied to obtain the ap-
LSTM 0.328 0.401 0.358 46.82 proximated data for the months where the data is not present.
CNN-LSTM 0.218 0.268 0.214 34.22
Proposed DLBL-WQA 0.015 0.117 0.115 20.32 COD analysis

COD is considered one of the important parameters which

forecasting such as support vector regression, linear regres-
sion, and neural network. The relative analysis is performed
on different test cases comprising of a specific region on
which the proposed model and other models are applied.
Table 7 presents the parameters set for each of these
techniques.
In this technique, we use 250 hidden nodes for layer
1 and layer 2, respectively. The output of CNN layer is
processed at the dropout layer to combine the attributes.
During the training phase of network, the dropout layer
focuses on discarding the connections between CNN
and LSTM layers in each epoch.
Palla region analysis
Water quality forecasting is the key factor in the water quality
administration of streams. To survey stream water quality,
play a significant role in water quality. It is the overall measure
of all the organic and in-organic chemicals present in the wa-
ter; the chemical oxygen demand (COD) is used to indirectly
measure the amount of organic substances present in water
which can include things like synthetic compounds, oil, sol-
vents, cleaning agents, and petrol. These toxins when spilled
and blended put an extra strain on the oxygen request in the
water which decays the nature of waterway. COD is a useful
measure for determining what organic load is present in the
water.
In this subsection, COD values are predicted for Palla re-
gion. Similar to the previous experiment, 6 years of water
quality samples are considered. Table 8 shows a comparative
analysis of COD prediction. Below given Table 7 shows the
comparative analysis of the various techniques:
This comparative analysis is depicted in below given Fig. 5
where we compare the outcome of various techniques to pre-
dict the COD for Palla region.

Fig. 5 COD comparison for Palla

region using various classifiers COD Analysis of Palla Region
MSE MAPE MAE RMSE

DLBL-WQA

CNN-LSTM

LSTM
Methods Used

LR

RF

SVR

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8

Obtained Values
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Environ Sci Pollut Res

Fig. 6 Palla region COD Palla Region Comparative Analysis

comparison between actual and
Actual COD Data Predicted COD Data
predicted values
40

35

30

COD Values
25

20

15

10

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
Sample (Month)

This comparative analysis shows that the MSE value BOD analysis
is decreased by 96.945%, 97.34%, 96.91%, 96.25%,
95.42%, and 93.11%; RMSE value using proposed ap- BOD is the extent of oxygen used by aerobic microor-
proach is decreased by 83.54%, 82.05%, 79.40%, ganism to break down the organic matters, and it serves
75.62%, 70.82%, and 56.34%; MAE values are de- as an important indicator of water pollution. The BOD
creased by 80.70%, 77.92%, 81.27%, 79.31%, 67.87%, of any aquatic system is the foremost parameter needed
and 46.26%; and MAPE values are decreased by for assessment of the water quality as well as develop-
62.56%, 62.51%, 61.83%, 60.38%, 56.59%, and ment of management strategies for the protection of wa-
40.61% when compared with the outcome of proposed ter resources
approach with SVR, ANN, RF, LR, LSTM and CNN- In this subsection, the BOD parameter is used to
LSTM, respectively. Below given Fig. 6 depicts the predict the water quality of the river in the Palla region
comparative analysis of dissolved oxygen prediction (Fig. 7). The complete experimental analysis and setup
where we show the relationship between actual and pre- are similar to the previous experiment. Below given
dicted values. Table 9 shows a comparative analysis in terms of
MSE, RMSE, MAE, and MAPE.

Fig. 7 BOD analysis for Palla

region BOD Analysis of Palla Region
MAPE MAE RMSE MSE

DLBL-WQA

CNN-LSTM

LSTM
Methods Used

LR

RF

ANN

SVR

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8

Obtained Values
 Author's Personal Copy
Environ Sci Pollut Res

Table 9 Palla region BOD prediction performance Conclusion and future scope
Methods MSE RMSE MAE MAPE
This study proposes a water quality forecasting method using
Support vector regression 0.580 0.662 0.671 46.88 deep learning techniques. It explores the applications of bidi-
Artificial neural network 0.580 0.557 0.628 43.91 rectional LSTM to forecast water quality factors like COD and
Random forest 0.540 0.460 0.527 41.01 BOD well in advance. The technique includes data pre-pro-
Linear regression 0.423 0.481 0.413 36.28 cessing, parameter setting, optimization, and learning proce-
LSTM 0.357 0.358 0.322 33.25 dure. The conventional CNN and LSTM models have high
CNN-LSTM 0.310 0.210 0.266 24.68 computational complexity and low prediction accuracy. To
Proposed DLBL-WQA 0.107 0.108 0.124 18.22 overcome this, an optimization model is used that helps to
reduce the training error and improve precision. The built-up
forecast model can be utilized, and adapted for various water
quality samples from different sources and accordingly may
Based on this analysis of BOD, we present a comparative have expansive application scenarios. The performance of the
analysis as depicted in below given Fig. 8 which illustrates the proposed DLBL-WQA model is compared with various state-
overall improvement in the performance of proposed ap- of-art forecasting models. Experimental studies show that the
proach in terms of MSE, RMSE, MAE, and MAPE. proposed approach attains the best forecasting accuracy and
According to this experiment, the MSE by using pro- lowest error rates out of all techniques. COD analysis illustrat-
posed approach is decreased by 81.55%, 81.55%, 80.18%, ed that the MSE and RMSE values for Palla region are obtain-
74.70%, 70.02%, and 65.48%; RMSE values decreased ed as 0.015 and 0.117, respectively. Further, the BOD analysis
by 83.68%, 80.61%, 53.17%, 77.54%, 69.83%, and in this area illustrated that the MSE and RMSE values are as
48.57%; MAE values are decreased by 81.52%, 80.25%, 0.107 and 0.108, respectively. Consequently, this model could
76.47%, 69.97%, 61.49%, and 53.38%; and MAPE values be successfully used to estimate various water quality factors
are decreased by 61.13%, 58.50%, 55.57%, 49.77%, well in advance thereby helping in its quality monitoring and
45.20%, and 26.17% when compared with the outcome management.
of proposed approach with SVR, ANN, RF, LR, LSTM, The present study uses time-series data analysis of a
and CNN-LSTM, respectively. single-dimensional input for water quality monitoring.
Based on this experiment, we present a comparative anal- The future scope of this work can include attribute se-
ysis of BOD prediction for considered BOD samples. Figure 8 lection and analysis of different parameters to monitor
demonstrates the performance comparison between actual and the water quality. Complex relationships between the
predicted BOD values. The experimental study shows that the different water quality variables can also be exploited
proposed model attains similar values as the actual values. to further enhance the accuracy of forecasting. Besides,
The abovementioned BOD and COD analysis show that the present research predicted the water quality data in
the proposed model provides an accurate estimation of water one monitoring station in the Palla region of Yamuna
quality parameters for forecasting. River. In future research, more monitoring stations

Fig. 8 Palla region BOD

Palla Region Comparative Analysis
comparison between actual and
predicted values Actual BOD Data Predicted BOD Data

10

8
BOD Values

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
Sample (Month)
 Author's Personal Copy
could be included to study the water quality in spatial
dimensions under the hydrodynamic principle.
Acknowledgements The authors thank CPCB, New Delhi, for providing
Yamuna river water quality data.
Availability of data and materials The data that support the findings of
this study are available from the Central Pollution Control Board, New
Delhi, India, but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which
were used under license for the current study and so are not publicly
available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable
request and with permission of the Central Pollution Control Board.
Author contribution SK implemented the methodology and prepared the
manuscript with the guidance of NS (PhD supervisor).
Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate NA
Consent for publication NA
Conflict of interest The authors declare no competing interests.
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