Enhancing sewage flow prediction using an integrated improved SSA-CNN-Transformer-BiLSTM model

Accurate prediction of sewage flow is crucial for optimizing sewage treatment processes, cutting down energy consumption, and reducing pollution incidents. Current prediction models, including traditional statistical models and machine learning models, have limited performance when handling nonlinear and high-noise data. Although deep learning models excel in time series prediction, they still face challenges such as computational complexity, overfitting, and poor performance in practical applications. Accordingly, this study proposed a combined prediction model based on an improved sparrow search algorithm (SSA), convolutional neural network (CNN), transformer, and bidirectional long short-term memory network (BiLSTM) for sewage flow prediction. Specifically, the CNN part was responsible for extracting local features from the time series, the Transformer part captured global dependencies using the attention mechanism, and the BiLSTM part performed deep temporal processing of the features. The improved SSA algorithm optimized the model's hyperparameters to improve prediction accuracy and generalization capability. The proposed model was validated on a sewage flow dataset from an actual sewage treatment plant. Experimental results showed that the introduced Transformer mechanism significantly enhanced the ability to handle long time series data, and an improved SSA algorithm effectively optimized the hyperparameter selection, improving the model's prediction accuracy and training efficiency. After introducing an improved SSA, CNN, and Transformer modules, the prediction model's $R^{\text{2}}$ increased by 0.18744, $RMSE$ (root mean square error) decreased by 114.93, and $MAE$ (mean absolute error) decreased by 86.67. The difference between the predicted peak/trough flow and monitored peak/trough flow was within 3.6% and the predicted peak/trough flow appearance time was within 2.5 minutes away from the monitored peak/trough flow time. By employing a multi-model fusion approach, this study achieved efficient and accurate sewage flow prediction, highlighting the potential and application prospects of the model in the field of sewage treatment.