Mining Explainable Predictive Features for Water Quality Management

With water quality management processes, identifying and interpreting relationships between features, such as location and weather variable tuples, and water quality variables, such as levels of bacteria, is key to gaining insights and identifying areas where interventions should be made. There is a need for a search process to identify the locations and types of phenomena that are influencing water quality and a need to explain why the quality is being affected and which factors are most relevant. This paper addresses both of these issues through the development of a process for collecting data for features that represent a variety of variables over a spatial region, which are used for training and inference, and analysing the performance of the features using the model and Shapley values. Shapley values originated in cooperative game theory and can be used to aid in the interpretation of machine learning results. Evaluations are performed using several machine learning algorithms and water quality data from the Dublin Grand Canal basin.