Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Prediction of Effluent Phosphorus in a Full-Scale Wastewater Treatment Plant with Missing Phosphorus Input and Removal Data

Although artificial intelligence (AI) such as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) has been recognized as an emerging and promising tool, its application becomes challenging with incomplete data collection. Herein, in the absence of the influent phosphorus load and chemical dosage data for phosphorus removal, we employed ML/DL models to predict effluent phosphorus using nine-year data from a small-scale wastewater treatment plant. Attempts were made to select essential model input features from 42 variables by using Pearson correlation analysis to reveal internal correlations among variables. First, five ML regression models were used to predict the effluent phosphorus load, and a maximum coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.637 was achieved with the support vector machine model. Then, the DL model named long short-term memory could predict phosphorus load in one-day advance with an R² value of 0.496. Finally, on the basis of the historical data, an anomaly alarm design was proposed to minimize the chance of exceeding the discharge permit and achieved a maximum accuracy of 79.7% to predict the phosphorus concentration after comparing seven ML classification models. This study provides an example of applying AI for process improvement and potential cost reduction with incomplete data sets.