**Intelligent Soft Computing Models in Water Demand Forecasting**

Sina Shabani, Peyman Yousefi, Jan Adamowski and Gholamreza Naser

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/63675

### **Abstract**

Given the increasing trend in water scarcity, which threatens a number of regions worldwide, governments and water distribution system (WDS) operators have sought accurate methods of estimating water demands. While investigators have proposed stochastic and deterministic techniques to model water demands in urban WDS, the performance of soft computing techniques [*e.g*., Genetic Expression Programming (GEP)] and machine learning methods [*e.g*., Support Vector Machines (SVM)] in this endeavour remains to be evaluated. The present study proposed a new rationale and a novel technique in forecasting water demand. Phase space reconstruction was used to feed the determinants of water demand with proper lag times, followed by develop‐ ment of GEP and SVM models. The relative accuracy of the three best models was evaluated on the basis of performance indices: coefficient of determination (*R*<sup>2</sup> ), mean absolute error (*MAE*), root mean square of error (*RMSE*), and Nash-Sutcliff coefficient (*E*). Results showed GEP models were highly sensitive to data classification, genetic operators, and optimum lag time. The SVM model that implemented a Polynomial kernel function slightly outperformed the GEP models. This study showed how phase space reconstruction could potentially improve water demand forecasts using soft computing techniques.

**Keywords:** water demand forecasting, soft computing, genetic expression program‐ ming, support vector machines, phase space reconstruction, lag time

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
