Predicting abrupt depletion of dissolved oxygen in Chaohu lake using CNN-BiLSTM with improved attention mechanism

Depletion of dissolved oxygen (DO) is a significant incentive for biological catastrophic events in freshwater lakes. Although predicting the DO concentrations in lakes with high-frequency real-time data to prevent hypoxic events is effective, few related experimental studies were made. In this study, a short-term predicting model was developed for DO concentrations in three problematic areas in China's Chaohu Lake. To predict the DO concentrations at these representative sites, which coincide with biological abnormal death areas, water quality indicators at the three sampling sites and hydrometeorological features were adopted as input variables. The monitoring data were collected every 4 h between 2020 and 2023 and applied separately to train and test the model at a ratio of 8:2. A new AC-BiLSTM coupling model of the convolution neural network (CNN) and the bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) with the attention mechanism (AM) was proposed to tackle characteristics of discontinuous dynamic change of DO concentrations in long time series. Compared with the BiLSTM and CNN-BiLSTM models, the AC-BiLSTM showed better performance in the evaluation criteria of MSE, MAE, and R