Gaussian process regression (GPR) is proposed as a tool of long-term groundwater quality predictions. The major advantage of GPR is that both prediction and the prediction related uncertainty are provided simultaneously. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed tool, GPR and a conventional non-parametric trend analysis tool are comparatively applied to synthetic examples. From the application, it has been found that GPR shows better performance compared to the conventional method, especially when the groundwater quality data shows typical non-linear trend. The GPR model is further employed to the long-term groundwater quality predictions based on the data from two domestically operated groundwater monitoring stations. From the applications, it has been shown that the model can make reasonable predictions for the majority of the linear trend cases with a few exceptions of severely non-Gaussian data. Furthermore, for the data shows non-linear trend, GPR with mean of second order equation is successfully applied.
Keywords: Groundwater quality;Trend analysis;Gaussian process regression;Theil-Sen estimator;Groundwater quality monitoring network;