A Supervised Learning Approach to Water Quality Parameter Prediction and Fault Detection

Authors

Kathleen Joslyn, Portland State UniversityFollow
John Lipor, Portland State UniversityFollow

Published In

2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)

Document Type

Citation

Publication Date

1-24-2019

Abstract

Water quality parameters such as dissolved oxygen and turbidity play a key role in policy decisions regarding the maintenance and use of the nation's major bodies of water. In particular, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) maintains a massive suite of sensors throughout the nation's waterways that are used to inform such decisions, with all data made available to the public. However, the corresponding measurements are regularly corrupted due to sensor faults, fouling, and decalibration, and hence USGS scientists are forced to spend costly time and resources manually examining data to look for anomalies. We present a method of automatically detecting such events using supervised machine learning. We first present an extensive study of which water quality parameters can be reliably predicted, using support vector machines and gradient boosting algorithms for regression. We then show that the trained predictors can be used to automatically detect sensor decalibration, providing a system that could be easily deployed by the USGS to reduce the resources needed to maintain data fidelity.

Description

© Copyright 2019 IEEE - All rights reserved.

Locate the Document

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8622628

DOI

10.1109/BigData.2018.8622628

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/29027

Publisher

IEEE

Citation Details

Joslyn, K., & Lipor, J. (2018, December). A Supervised Learning Approach to Water Quality Parameter Prediction and Fault Detection. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data) (pp. 2511-2514). IEEE.