WATER POTABILITY CLASSIFICATION USING MACHINE LEARNING: A CASE STUDY ON HANDLING INCOMPLETE DATA

Open

Hayyun Lisdiana, Karli Eka Setiawan

2026 Communications in Mathematical Biology and Neuroscience Vol. 2026 Article Cited by 0 SDG 6SDG 17 Quartile

Abstract

Water is essential for the preservation of life on Earth, particularly for drinking purposes. Despite the abundance of water in the earth's ecosystem, the world is currently grappling with a significant global issue of contaminated water, a problem that extends beyond natural contamination and includes industrial wastewater. In this study, we aimed to investigate the potential of decision tree-based machine learning models, including decision trees, ensemble boosting, ensemble bagging, and random forests, in predicting water potability based on specific parameters. We used publicly available data from the "Water Quality and Potability" Kaggle dataset. Due to the high number of missing values for some parameters in the dataset, our research initially converted continuous, missing values into discrete or categorical values. We then filled these gaps with a general label, "unknown," instead of using mean or median values as other studies had done. Initially the result showed that the highest accuracy was random forest; our analysts showed that the sulfate parameters created confusion for the machine learning model due to the many missing values. So that, this research decided to exclude sulfate data from the dataset, and this research showed significant results where all decision tree-based machine learning models can achieve 100% accuracy, precision, recall, and f1score on evaluation using the test dataset. © 2026 the author(s).

Affiliations

Department of Chemistry Education, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Science, Universitas Negeri Jakarta, Jakarta, 13220, Indonesia; Computer Science Department, School of Computer Science, Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, 11480, Indonesia

Research at a Glance

Premium content — register to unlock

Research at a Glance

Register to unlock

Topics & SDG Alignment

Premium content — register to unlock

Topics & SDG Alignment

Register to unlock

Collaboration

Premium content — register to unlock

Collaboration

Register to unlock

Author Profile (Selected)

Premium content — register to unlock

Author Profile (Selected)

Register to unlock

References Overview

Premium content — register to unlock

References Overview

Register to unlock

Journal & Source

Premium content — register to unlock

Journal & Source

Register to unlock

Metadata & Integrity

Premium content — register to unlock

Metadata & Integrity

Register to unlock