Enhancing accuracy and interpretability of multi-steps water demand prediction through prior knowledge integration in neural network architecture

In the field of water supply management, multi-steps water demand forecasting plays a crucial role. While there have been many studies related to multi-steps water demand forecasting based on deep learning, little attention has been paid to the interpretability of forecasting models. Aiming to improve both the forecasting accuracy and interpretability of the model, a novel urban water demand forecasting neural network (UWDFNet) was presented in this paper. Compared with traditional deep learning models, it innovatively considered domain-specific prior knowledge from water supply management and incorporated the correlation relationship between different input variables into the design of the neural network structure, and verified the consistency between the knowledge learned by the model and prior knowledge through interpretability analysis. Additionally, a systematic performance evaluation was conducted and proved that UWDFNet possesses better accuracy and stability compared to other baseline models(e.g., gated recurrent unit network (GRUN), GRUN with a corrected Network (GRUN+CORRNet), GRUN+PID, GRUN+Kmeans).