Identification of land use with water quality data in stormwater using a neural network.

To control stormwater pollution effectively, development of innovative, land-use-related control strategies will be required. An approach that could differentiate land-use types from stormwater quality would be the first step to solving this problem. We propose a neural network approach to examine the relationship between stormwater water quality and various types of land use. The neural network model can be used to identify land-use types for future known and unknown cases. The neural model uses a Bayesian network and has 10 water quality input variables, four neurons in the hidden layer, and five land-use target variables (commercial, industrial, residential, transportation, and vacant). We obtained 92.3 percent of correct classification and 0.157 root-mean-squared error on test files. Based on the neural model, simulations were performed to predict the land-use type of a known data set, which was not used when developing the model. The simulation accurately described the behavior of the new data set. This study demonstrates that a neural network can be effectively used to produce land-use type classification with water quality data.