Abstract
This paper proposes a novel interval prediction method for effluent water quality indicators (including biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N)), which are key performance indices in the water quality monitoring and control of a wastewater treatment plant. Firstly, the effluent data regarding BOD/NH3-N and their necessary auxiliary variables are collected. After some basic data pre-processing techniques, the key indicators with high correlation degrees of BOD and NH3-N are analyzed and selected based on a gray correlation analysis algorithm. Next, an improved IBES-LSSVM algorithm is designed to predict the BOD/NH3-N effluent data of a wastewater treatment plant. This algorithm relies on an improved bald eagle search (IBES) optimization algorithm that is used to find the optimal parameters of least squares support vector machine (LSSVM). Then, an interval estimation method is used to analyze the uncertainty of the optimized LSSVM model. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can obtain high prediction accuracy, with reduced computational time and an easy calculation process, in predicting effluent water quality parameters compared with other existing algorithms.