Estimation of waste mobile phones in the Philippines using neural networks

Abstract

Waste mobile phone is one of the subgroups of e-waste which is defined as discarded electronic products in the Philippine context. This study estimated current and projected quantities of waste mobile phones in the country using feed forward neural network. The neural network architecture used had three layers: (i) input layer, (ii) hidden layer, and (iii) output layer. Seven input factors were fed to the network: (i) population, (ii) literacy rate, (iii) mobile connections, (iv) mobile subscribers, (v) gross domestic product (GDP), (vi) GDP per capita, and (vii) US dollar to Philippine peso exchange rate. These input factors were selected based on the criteria provided in the study by the Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association (GSMA) Intelligence in 2015 on why the Philippines is an innovation hub in mobile industry and the availability of data from the sources. The structure was designed with five hidden layers which consisted of (i) six neurons for layer 1, (ii) five neurons for layer 2, (iii) four neurons for layer 3, (iv) three neurons for layer 4, and (v) two neurons for layer 5. The neural network was designed to initially calculate the sales of mobile phones before estimating waste mobile phone generation. Visual Gene Developer 1.7 Software was used which achieved a sum of squared error of 0.00001. Estimated values were found to be in good agreement with a calculated accuracy of 99%. This study can be used by policy makers as basis for strategy formulation and as guideline and baseline data for establishing a proper management system. Neural network performed better than the traditional linear extrapolation method for forecasting of data.