A Novel Approach for Predicting Water Demand with Complex Patterns Based on Ensemble Learning

Predicting urban water demand is important in rationalizing water allocation and building smart cities. Influenced by multifarious factors, water demand is with high-frequency noise and complex patterns. It is difficult for a single learner to predict the nonlinear water demand time series. Therefore, ensemble learning is introduced in this work to predict water demand. A model (Word-embedded Temporal Feature Network, WE-TFN) for predicting water demand influenced by complex factors is proposed as a base learner. Besides, the seasonal time series model and the Principal Component Analysis and Temporal Convolutional Network (PCA-TCN) are combined with WE-TFN for ensemble learning. Based on the water demand data set provided by the Shenzhen Open Data Innovation Contest (SODIC), WE-TFN is compared with some typical models. The experimental results show that WE-TFN performs well in fitting local extreme values and predicting volatility. The ensemble learning method declines by approximately 68.73% on average on the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) compared with a single base learner. Overall, WE-TFN and the ensemble learning method outperform baselines and perform well in water demand prediction.