ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK MODELING OF THE WATER QUALITY INDEX FOR THE EUPHRATES RIVER IN IRAQ

This study was aimed to investigate the development and evaluation of artificial intelligence techniques by using multilayer neural network. Levenberg-Marquardt back propagation (LMA) training algorithm was applied for calculating drinking water quality index (WQI) for Euphrates river (IRAQ). The transfer functions in the artificial network model were tangent sigmoid and linear for hidden and output layers, respectively. Eleven neurons presented for good prediction for results of (WQI) with a coefficient of correlation >0.97 and statistically calculated WQI values, inferring that the model predictions explain 94% of the variation in the calculated WQI scores. The WQI score of the Euphrates was 142 considered as poor. The analysis of sensitivity revealed that the total dissolved solids (TDS) is the highest effective variable with the relative importance of (26.3%), followed by electrical conductivity (EC) (23.1%), pH (17.3%), calcium (Ca) (0.149), chlorides (Cl) (11.2%), Hardness (5.7%), Temperature (1.3%), respectively. It can be concluded that the model presented in this study gives a useful alternate to WQI assessment, which use sub indices formulae.