Gholamreza Naser

By Sina Shabani, Peyman Yousefi, Jan Adamowski and Gholamreza Naser

Given the increasing trend in water scarcity, which threatens a number of regions worldwide, governments and water distribution system (WDS) operators have sought accurate methods of estimating water demands. While investigators have proposed stochastic and deterministic techniques to model water demands in urban WDS, the performance of soft computing techniques [e.g., Genetic Expression Programming (GEP)] and machine learning methods [e.g., Support Vector Machines (SVM)] in this endeavour remains to be evaluated. The present study proposed a new rationale and a novel technique in forecasting water demand. Phase space reconstruction was used to feed the determinants of water demand with proper lag times, followed by development of GEP and SVM models. The relative accuracy of the three best models was evaluated on the basis of performance indices: coefficient of determination (R2), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square of error (RMSE), and Nash-Sutcliff coefficient (E). Results showed GEP models were highly sensitive to data classification, genetic operators, and optimum lag time. The SVM model that implemented a Polynomial kernel function slightly outperformed the GEP models. This study showed how phase space reconstruction could potentially improve water demand forecasts using soft computing techniques.

Part of the book: Water Stress in Plants

By Peyman Yousefi, Gholamreza Naser and Hadi Mohammadi

The forecasting of future value of water consumption in an urban area is highly complex and nonlinear. It often exhibits a high degree of spatial and temporal variability. It is a crucial factor for long-term sustainable management and improvement of the operation of urban water allocation system. This chapter will study the application of two pre-processing phase space reconstruction (PSR) and wavelet decomposition transform (WDT) methods to investigate the behavior of time series to forecast short-term water demand value of Kelowna City (BC, Canada). The research proposes two pre-process technique to improve the accuracy of the models. Artificial neural networks (ANNs), gene expression programming (GEP) and multilinear regression (MLR) methods are the tools that considered for forecasting the demand values. Evaluation of the tools is based on two steps with and without applying the pre-processing methods. Moreover, autocorrelation function (ACF) is used to calculate the lag time. Correlation dimension is used to study the chaotic behavior of the dataset. The models’ relative performance is compared using three different fitness indexes; coefficient of determination (CD), root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE). The results showed how pre-processing combination of WDT and PSR improved the performance of the models in forecasting short-term demand values.

Part of the book: Wavelet Theory and Its Applications