Freshwater quality and quantity are some of the fundamental requirements for sustaining human life and civilization. The Water Quality Index is the most extensively used parameter for determining water quality worldwide. However, the traditional approach for the calculation of the WQI is often complex and time consuming since it requires handling large data sets and involves the calculation of several subindices. We investigated the performance of artificial intelligence techniques, including particle swarm optimization (PSO), a naive Bayes classifier (NBC), and a support vector machine (SVM), for predicting the water quality index. We used an SVM and NBC for prediction, in conjunction with PSO for optimization. To validate the obtained results, groundwater water quality parameters and their corresponding water quality indices were found for water collected from the Pindrawan tank area in Chhattisgarh, India. Our results show that PSO–NBC provided a 92.8% prediction accuracy of the WQI indices, whereas the PSO–SVM accuracy was 77.60%. The study’s outcomes further suggest that ensemble machine learning (ML) algorithms can be used to estimate and predict the Water Quality Index with significant accuracy. Thus, the proposed framework can be directly used for the prediction of the WQI using the measured field parameters while saving significant time and effort.
Landslide susceptibility map aids decision makers and planners for the prevention and mitigation of landslide hazard. This study presents a methodology for the generation of landslide susceptibility mapping using remote sensing data and Geographic Information System technique for the part of the Darjeeling district, Eastern Himalaya, in India. Topographic, earthquake, and remote sensing data and published geology, soil, and rainfall maps were collected and processed using Geographic Information System. Landslide influencing factors in the study area are drainage, lineament, slope, rainfall, earthquake, lithology, land use/land cover, fault, valley, soil, relief, and aspect. These factors were evaluated for the generation of thematic data layers. Numerical weight and rating for each factor was assigned using the overlay analysis method for the generation of landslide susceptibility map in the Geographic Information System environment. The resulting landslide susceptibility zonation map demarcated the study area into four different susceptibility classes: very high, high, moderate, and low. Particle Swarm Optimization‐Support Vector Machine technique was used for the prediction and classification of landslide susceptibility classes, and Genetic Programming method was used to generate models and to predict landslide susceptibility classes in conjunction with Geographic Information System output, respectively. Genetic Programming and Particle Swarm Optimization‐Support Vector Machine have performed well with respect to overall prediction accuracy and validated the landslide susceptibility model generated in the Geographic Information System environment. The efficiency of the landslide susceptibility zonation map was also confirmed by correlating the landslide frequency between different susceptible classes.
1 November 2020 in Journal of Contaminant Hydrology