Artificial neural networks and support vector machines for water demand time series forecasting

Water plays a pivotal role in many physical processes, and most importantly in sustaining human life, animal life and plant life. Water supply entities therefore have the responsibility to supply clean and safe water at the rate required by the consumer. It is therefore necessary to implement mechanisms and systems that can be employed to predict both short-term and long-term water demands. The increasingly growing field of computational intelligence techniques has been proposed as an efficient tool in the modelling of dynamic phenomena. The primary objective of this paper is to compare the efficiency of two computational intelligence techniques in water demand forecasting. The techniques under comparison are Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). In this study it was observed that ANNs perform better than SVMs. This performance is measured against the generalisation ability of the two.