Interpretable tree-based ensemble model for predicting beach water quality

•Interpretable tree-based ensemble models are developed for beach water quality.•LightGBM achieves the highest averaged precision and recall scores.•SHAP values reveal lake turbidity as the most important and robust predictor.•Accurate local data of wave height and rainfall are crucial for model performance. Tree-based machine learning models based on environmental features offer low-cost and timely solutions for predicting microbial fecal contamination in beach water to inform the public of the health risk. However, many of these models are black boxes that are difficult for humans to understand, which may cause severe consequences such as unexplained decisions and failure in accountability. To develop interpretable predictive models for beach water quality, we evaluate five tree-based models, namely classification tree, random forest, CatBoost, XGBoost, and LightGBM, and employ a state-of-the-art explanation method SHAP to explain the models. When tested on the Escherichia coli (E. coli) concentration data collected from three beach sites along Lake Erie shores, LightGBM, followed by XGBoost, achieves the highest averaged precision and recall scores. For all three sites, both models suggest lake turbidity as the most important predictor, and elucidate the crucial role of accurate local data of wave height and rainfall in the model development. Local SHAP values further reveal the robustness of the importance of lake turbidity as its SHAP value increases nearly monotonically with its value and is minimally affected by other environmental factors. Moreover, we found an intriguing interaction between lake turbidity and day-of-year. This work suggests that the combination of LightGBM and SHAP has a promising potential to develop interpretable models for predicting microbial water quality in freshwater lakes. [Display omitted]