Prediction model of sparse autoencoder-based bidirectional LSTM for wastewater flow rate

Sanitary sewer overflows caused by excessive rainfall derived infiltration and inflow is the major challenge currently faced by municipal administrations, and therefore, the ability to correctly predict the wastewater state of the sanitary sewage system in advance is especially significant. In this paper, we present the design of the Sparse Autoencoder-based Bidirectional long short-term memory (SAE-BLSTM) network model, a model built on Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) and Bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) networks to predict the wastewater flow rate in a sanitary sewer system. This network model consists of a data preprocessing segment, the SAE network segment, and the BLSTM network segment. The SAE is capable of performing data dimensionality reduction on high-dimensional original input feature data from which it can extract sparse potential features from the aforementioned high-dimensional original input feature data. The potential features extracted by the SAE hidden layer are concatenated with the smooth historical wastewater flow rate features to create an augmented previous feature vector that more accurately predicts the wastewater flow rate. These augmented previous features are applied to the BLSTM network to predict the future wastewater flow rate. Thus, this network model combines two kinds of abilities, SAE's low-dimensional nonlinear representation for original input feature data and BLSTM's time series prediction for wastewater flow rate. Then, we conducted extensive experiments on the SAE-BLSTM network model utilizing the real-world hydrological time series datasets and employing advanced SVM, FCN, GRU, LSTM, and BLSTM models as comparison algorithms. The experimental results show that our proposed SAE-BLSTM model consistently outperforms the advanced comparison models. Specifically, we selected a 3 months period training dataset in our dataset to train and test the SAE-BLSTM network model. The SAE-BLSTM network model yielded the lowest RMSE, MAE, and highest R2, which are 242.55, 179.05, and 0.99626, respectively.