Forecasting Urban Water Demand Via Wavelet-Denoising and Neural Network Models. Case Study: City of Syracuse, Italy

Forecasting urban water demand can be of use in the management of water utilities. For example, activities such as water‐budgeting, operation and maintenance of pumps, wells, reservoirs, and mains require quantitative estimations of water resources at specified future dates. In this study, we tackle the problem of forecasting urban water demand by means of back‐propagation artificial neural networks (ANNs) coupled with wavelet‐denoising. In addition, non‐coupled ANN and Linear Multiple Regression were used as comparison models. We considered the case of the municipality of Syracuse, Italy; for this purpose, we used a 7 year‐long time series of water demand without additional predictors. Six forecasting horizons were considered, from 1 to 6 months ahead. The main objective was to implement a forecasting model that may be readily used for municipal water budgeting. An additional objective was to explore the impact of wavelet‐denoising on ANN generalization. For this purpose, we measured the impact of five different wavelet filter‐banks (namely, Haar and Daubechies of type db2, db3, db4, and db5) on a single neural network. Empirical results show that neural networks coupled with Haar and Daubechies’ filter‐banks of type db2 and db3 outperformed all of the following: non‐coupled ANN, Multiple Linear Regression and ANN models coupled with Daubechies filters of type db4 and db5. The results of this study suggest that reduced variance in the training‐set (by means of denoising) may improve forecasting accuracy; on the other hand, an oversimplification of the input‐matrix may deteriorate forecasting accuracy and induce network instability.