Improving activated sludge classification based on imbalanced data

A fast and accurate classification method for sewage sludge biological activity classification is of great significance for wastewater treatment. However, the data are often imbalanced and the accuracy of traditional classification algorithms applied to imbalanced small classes of data is very low. Such small classes are crucial application data. Therefore, based on the analysis of eight microorganisms, a novel method is proposed in this paper for the classification of activated sludge known as balanced support-vector-based back-propagation (SV-BP) neural network. It first splits the multiclass classification problem into a plurality of pairwise classification problems and uses a support vector machine (SVM) to achieve equalization. Second, the new dataset is produced, following which back-propagation neural network (BPNN) is used for training and classification. To examine the efficiency of the model, 1731 real data points are collected from a wastewater treatment factory and divide the data into four classes with the help of wastewater experts. Based on the new model, data redundancy and noise are greatly reduced. With area under the curve (AUC) measurements, we find that the AUC of SV-BP is 6.9% higher than classical BPNN. In addition, the small-class recognition rate of SV-BP is far better than that by classical BPNN and SVM algorithms.