Prediction of Heavy Metals Concentration in the Groundwater Resources in Razan Plain: Extreme Learning Machine vs. Artificial Neural Network and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline

The groundwater is known as a major water source for domestic, industrial and agricultural purposes in the Razan Plain. Therefore, the prediction of toxic and essential elements (arsenic, lead, and zinc) content in groundwater resources of this area is important.

The main aim of this study was to investigate the extreme learning machine model as a novel model for the prediction of heavy metals concentration at Razan Plain, Hamedan province, Iran.

In this descriptive study, a total of 60 groundwater specimens were collected from 20 semi-deep and deep wells across the studied area. After preparing the specimens in the laboratory, the elements’ content was detected using inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) in three replicates. In the next step, three types of machine learning methods, including, extreme learning machine (ELM), artificial neural network (ANN) and multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS) were used to predict the heavy metals concentration in groundwater resources in Razan Plain, Hamedan, Iran. The models were trained using training data (the first 80% of the data) to find optimum values for weights and biases followed by testing using testing data (the first 20% of the data) collected from the study area. The used data were representative of the concentration of the As, Zn and Pb in Razan Plain. Three evaluation measures, correlation coefficient (r), coefficient of determination (R2) and root mean square error (RMSE) were applied to investigate the accuracy of models in estimation of heavy metals concentration.

The results showed that the mean content (µg/L) of the analyzed elements in groundwater samples of Razan Plain was 6.35 for As, 5.24 for Pb, and 32.4 for Zn. In addition, based on the findings the superiority of ELM was confirmed compared with the ANN and MARS models. ELM model decreased RMSE for ANN and MARS by 39.8% and 47.8% for As, 38.5% and 59.8% for Zn, and 64.4% and 75.5% for Pb, respectively. The results indicated that the ELM model can be successfully utilized for predicting heavy metals concentration in groundwater resources.

The developed ELM approach can be successfully applied to estimate the concentration of As, Pb, and Zn in Razan Palin.