Multi-step ahead forecasting of electrical conductivity in rivers by using a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network-Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) model enhanced by Boruta-XGBoost feature selection algorithm

Abstract Electrical conductivity (EC) is widely recognized as one of the most essential water quality metrics for predicting salinity and mineralization. In the current research, the EC of two Australian rivers (Albert River and Barratta Creek) was forecasted for up to 10 days using a novel deep learning algorithm (Convolutional Neural Network combined with Long Short-Term Memory Model, CNN-LSTM). The Boruta-XGBoost feature selection method was used to determine the significant inputs (time series lagged data) to the model. To compare the performance of Boruta-XGB-CNN-LSTM models, three machine learning approaches—multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLP), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) were used. Different statistical metrics, such as correlation coefficient (R), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error, were used to assess the models' performance. From 10 years of data in both rivers, 7 years (2012–2018) were used as a training set, and 3 years (2019–2021) were used for testing the models. Application of the Boruta-XGB-CNN-LSTM model in forecasting one day ahead of EC showed that in both stations, Boruta-XGB-CNN-LSTM can forecast the EC parameter better than other machine learning models for the test dataset (R = 0.9429, RMSE = 45.6896, MAPE = 5.9749 for Albert River, and R = 0.9215, RMSE = 43.8315, MAPE = 7.6029 for Barratta Creek). Considering the better performance of the Boruta-XGB-CNN-LSTM model in both rivers, this model was used to forecast 3–10 days ahead of EC. The results showed that the Boruta-XGB-CNN-LSTM model is very capable of forecasting the EC for the next 10 days. The results showed that by increasing the forecasting horizon from 3 to 10 days, the performance of the Boruta-XGB-CNN-LSTM model slightly decreased. The results of this study show that the Boruta-XGB-CNN-LSTM model can be used as a good soft computing method for accurately predicting how the EC will change in rivers.