Estimating the Potential of Biogas Yield from Anaerobic Co-digestion of Organic Waste with Ensemble Machine learning

Abstract

The biogas has the potential to serve as a substitute as fossil derived fuel. The present study investigates anaerobic co-digestion of organic waste for predictive modelling. Several co-digestion studies were performed with different pH, solid concentration, temperature, and co-digestion ratios. A water displacement apparatus was used to test biogas yield, and data was collected meticulously. Linear regression (LR) and Random Forest (RF) based models were built with Python-based tools and tested using statistical measures for the prediction of biogas yield. The LR showed a strong linear association, with R and R2 values of 0.9892 and 0.9785, respectively. However, RF surpassed LR, with higher R and R2 values of 0.9919 and 0.9826, respectively. Furthermore, RF had lower MSE and MAE values, indicating higher prediction accuracy and precision. RF consistently scored well in tests, demonstrating its ability to capture complicated relationships while minimizing prediction mistakes. Taylor's diagrams further demonstrated RF's excellent performance during both the training and testing periods. Overall, RF emerges as the optimum model for reliably estimating biogas output in anaerobic co-digestion systems, with important implications for waste-to-energy processes.