Black-Box Software Sensor Design for Environmental Monitoring
Software sensor design consists in building a model to estimate an unknown quantity, with error bars, using other available measurements. In the environmental domain, due to a lack of physical model, non-linearities, and unknown time dependencies, black-box modelling is required. An application in river water quality monitoring illustrates a neural network based methodology. All stages of the method are described from data cleaning, and model selection, predictor estimation and prediction validity assessment. The originality of the approach is that it provides automatically an estimation of inputs relevance in merging the input selection and prediction estimation steps.