Comparative analysis of machine learning methods for prediction of chlorophyll-a in a river with different hydrology characteristics: A case study in Fuchun River, China

Eutrophication is a serious threat to water quality and human health, and chlorophyll-a (Chla) is a key indicator to represent eutrophication in rivers or lakes. Understanding the spatial-temporal distribution of Chla and its accurate prediction are significant for water system management. In this study, spatial-temporal analysis and correlation analysis were applied to reveal Chla concentration pattern in the Fuchun River, China. Then four exogenous variables (wind speed, water temperature, dissolved oxygen and turbidity) were used for predicting Chla concentrations by six models (3 traditional machine learning models and 3 deep learning models) and compare the performance in a river with different hydrology characteristics. Statistical analysis shown that the Chla concentration in the reservoir river segment was higher than in the natural river segment during August and September, while the dominant algae gradually changed from Cyanophyta to Cryptophyta. Moreover, air temperature, water temperature and dissolved oxygen had high correlations with Chla concentrations among environment factors. The results of the prediction models demonstrate that extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) were the best performance model in the reservoir river segment (NSE = 0.93; RMSE = 4.67) and natural river segment (NSE = 0.94; RMSE = 1.84), respectively. This study provides a reference for further understanding eutrophication and early warning of algal blooms in different type of rivers. [Display omitted] •Chlorophyll-a in the reservoir river segment (RRS) were higher than the natural river segment (NRS) in August and September.•Temperature and DO were higher correlated with Chlorophyll-a, and the relationship was stronger in RRS than in NRS.•The successful application of machine learning algorithms enabled highly accurate predictions for water blooms.•XGBoost and LSTM were the best performance model in RRS and NRS, respectively.