Predicting Pollution Level Using Random Forest: A Case Study of Marilao River in Bulacan Province, Philippines
This is an incremental application of an existing method to a specific environmental problem for local inhabitants affected by industrial pollution.
This study tackled the problem of predicting pollution levels in the Marilao River in the Philippines using water quality parameters, achieving an accuracy of 91.75% with a Kappa value of 0.8115.
This study aims to predict the pollution level that threatens the Marilao River, located in the province of Bulacan, Philippines. The inhabitants of this area are now being exposed to pollution. Contamination of this waterway comes from both formal and informal industries, such as a used lead-acid battery, open dumpsites metal refining, and other toxic metals. Using various water quality parameters like Dissolved Oxygen (DO), Potential of Hydrogen (pH), Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Total Suspended Solids (TSS) were the basis for predicting the pollution level. This study used the Data Mining technique based on the sample data collected from January of 2013 to November of 2017. These were used as a training data and test results to predict the river condition with its corresponding pollution level classification indicated with the used of colors such as Green for Normal, Yellow for Average, Orange for Polluted and Red for Highly Polluted. The model got an accuracy of 91.75% with a Kappa value of 0.8115, interpreted as Strong in terms of the level of agreement.