Exploring the Relationships between Spatial and Demographic Parameters and Urban Water Consumption in Esfahan Using Association Rule Mining

In recent years, Iran has faced serious water scarcity and excessive use of water resources. Therefore, exploring the pattern of urban water consumption and the relationships between geographic and demographic parameters and water usage is an important requirement for effective management of water resources. In this study, association rule mining has been used to analyze the data of municipal water consumption in Esfahan urban areas. Association rules mining have been used to discover the connections between geographic and demographic parameters including the number of family members, the number of apartment units, residential building types, areal coverage of the house and green spaces, distance from river and central of city, spatial location, distance from main road, population density and percentage of young population with water consumption patterns. A version of Appriori algorithm with less computational volume that can processes large amounts of data has been used for association rule mining. Each of the extracted rules that satisfy minimum support equal 30 and minimum confidence equal 60 reflects the relationship of each spatial and demographic parameters with the consumption water. Then, the obtained rules have been evaluated and water consumption hot spots were extracted. Results shows that distance from the main road, areal coverage of the residential and green spaces have direct relationship with the household water consumption. On the other hand, number of residential units, population density, distance from river, X and Y value and percentage of young population are inversely related to household water consumption. Also, if the distance from the city center increases, household water consumption decreases. Moreover, the southern areas of the city by minimum distance from the river have the highest water consumption and specified as hot spots. In these neighborhoods, building types are villa and have a lower population density with higher area of green space and yard than others.