Research on urban water demand prediction based on machine learning and feature engineering

Urban water demand prediction is not only the foundation of water resource planning and management, but also an important component of water supply system optimization and scheduling. Therefore, predicting future water demand is of great significance. For univariate time series data, the issue of outliers can be solved through data preprocessing. Then, the data input dimension is increased through feature engineering, and finally, the LightGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine) model is used to predict future water demand. The results demonstrate that cubic polynomial interpolation outperforms the Prophet model and the linear method in the context of missing value interpolation tasks. In terms of predicting water demand, the LightGBM model demonstrates excellent forecasting performance and can effectively predict future water demand trends. The evaluation indicators MAPE (mean absolute percentage error) and NSE (Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient) on the test dataset are 4.28% and 0.94, respectively. These indicators can provide a scientific basis for short-term prediction of water supply enterprises.