Fuzzy system modelling of drinking water consumption prediction

It is important to determine the amount of daily drinking water requirement for a person not only for the health of people but also for the planning and management of the water resources. Physical activity, body weight and temperature play significant role in drinking water consumption rates. Human activity variables are most often given in crisp numerical interval classifications for water consumption calculations. The aim of this paper is to establish a fuzzy model for predicting the water consumption rates based on data at the hand. The fuzzy sets such as low, medium, high can be used to quantify vague, imprecise or incomplete descriptions which are collectively referred to as fuzzy data in the literature. Fuzzy model inputs are considered as the physical activity, body weight and temperature, whereas the output is the water consumption levels. The fuzzy sets are chosen in an appropriate manner and the prediction model of water consumption is compared with the actual consumption amounts. It is not possible to treat such linguistic fuzzy data by statistical methods. It is observed that the model predictions have less than 5% relative error. The model is tested with an independent data set for its successful prediction capability.