Modelling Bathing Water Quality Using Official Monitoring Data

Predictive models of bathing water quality are a useful support to traditional monitoring and provide timely and adequate information for the protection of public health. When developing models, it is critical to select an appropriate model type and appropriate metrics to reduce errors so that the predicted outcome is reliable. It is usually necessary to conduct intensive sampling to collect a sufficient amount of data. This paper presents the process of developing a predictive model in Kastela Bay (Adriatic Sea) using only data from regular (official) bathing water quality monitoring collected during five bathing seasons. The predictive modelling process, which included data preprocessing, model training, and model tuning, showed no silver bullet model and selected two model types that met the specified requirements: a neural network (ANN) for Escherichia coli and a random forest (RF) for intestinal enterococci. The different model types are probably the result of the different persistence of two indicator bacteria to the effects of marine environmental factors and consequently the different die-off rates. By combining these two models, the bathing water samples were classified with acceptable performances, an informedness of 71.7%, an F-score of 47.1%, and an overall accuracy of 80.6%.