Comparison of ARIMA and NNAR Models for Forecasting Water Treatment Plant’s Influent Characteristics

A reliable forecasting model for each Water Treatment Plant (WTP) influent characteristics is useful for controlling the plant’s operation. In this paper Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Neural Network Auto-Regressive (NNAR) modeling techniques were applied on a WTP’s influent water characteristics time series to make some models for short-term period (to seven days ahead) forecasting. The ARIMA and NNAR models both provided acceptable generalization capability with R 2 s ranged from 0.44 to 0.91 and 0.45 to 0.92, respectively, for chloride and temperature. Although a more prediction performance was observed for NNAR in comparison with ARIMA for all studied series, the forecasting performance of models was further examined using Time Series Cross-Validation (TSCV) and Diebold-Mariano test. The results showed ARIMA is more accurate than NNAR for forecasting the horizon-daily values for CO 2 , Cl and Ca time-series. Therefore, despite of the good predictive performance of NNAR, ARIMA may still stands as better alternative for forecasting task of aforementioned series. Thus, as a general rule, not only the predictive performance using R 2 statistic but also the forecasting performance of a model using TSCV, are need to be examined and compared for selecting an appropriate forecasting model for WTP’s influent characteristics.