COD and NH4-N estimation in the inflow of Wastewater Treatment Plants using Machine Learning Techniques

The in-line measurement of COD and NH₄-N in the WWTP inflow is crucial for the timely monitoring of biological wastewater treatment processes and for the development of advanced control strategies for optimized WWTP operation. As a direct measurement of COD and NH₄-N requires expensive and high maintenance in-line probes or analyzers, an approach estimating COD and NH₄-N based on standard and spectroscopic in-line inflow measurement systems using Machine Learning Techniques is presented in this paper. The results show that COD estimation using Radom Forest Regression with a normalized MSE of 0.3, which is sufficiently accurate for practical applications, can be achieved using only standard in-line measurements. In the case of NH₄-N, a good estimation using Partial Least Squares Regression with a normalized MSE of 0.16 is only possible based on a combination of standard and spectroscopic in-line measurements. Furthermore, the comparison of regression and classification methods shows that both methods perform equally well in most cases.