A filtering algorithm for high-resolution flow traces to improve water end-use analysis

Abstract

One of the main difficulties encountered when designing automatic tools for water end-use identification is the inherent noise present in recorded flow traces. Noise is mainly caused by the inability of the monitoring equipment to accurately register water consumption and data-loggers to register, without distortion, the signal received from the water meter. A universal filtering algorithm has been developed to remove noise and simplify water consumption flow traces with the aim of improving future automatic end-use identification algorithms. The performance of the proposed filtering methodology is assessed through the analysis of 21,647 events. Water consumption data were sourced from two different water end-use studies, having consumers and monitoring equipment with dissimilar characteristics. The results obtained show that the algorithm is capable of removing an average of 70% of the data points that constitute the flow traces of the complex events examined. The simplified flow traces allow for faster and more accurate disaggregation and classification algorithms, without losing significant information or distorting the original signal. The ability of the proposed filtering algorithm to fit the original flow traces was benchmarked using the Kling–Gupta efficiency coefficient, obtaining an average value above 0.79.