A Feasibility Study of IoT-Based Classification of Residential Water-Use Activities in Storage Tank Systems: A Comparative Analysis of Decision Trees, Random Forest, SVM, KNN, and Neural Networks

The increasing scarcity of urban water resources, particularly in regions with intermittent supply and household water storage tanks, demands monitoring approaches capable of identifying end-use consumption patterns beyond aggregated volume measurements. Framed primarily as a feasibility study, this research presents an IoT-based framework for the automated classification of residential water consumption activities using water-level dynamics and supervised machine learning. A non-intrusive sensing architecture based on hydrostatic pressure measurements was deployed in a domestic water tank and integrated with a cloud-based data acquisition and processing platform. Five representative household states and activities were considered: tank refilling, stable state, toilet flushing, washing clothes, and taking a bath. A labeled dataset comprising 4396 consumption events was used to train and evaluate Decision Tree, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbors, and Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM) models using features derived from water-level variations. All models achieved high performance, with accuracies above 0.92 and weighted F1-scores up to 0.93. The evaluated models showed highly comparable results, with the SVM (RBF) achieving a slightly higher accuracy (0.9307) in this evaluation setting, while ROC analysis showed AUC values between 0.97 and 1.00 across all classes, indicating strong discriminative capability. Additionally, specific activities such as washing clothes and tank refilling achieved precision and recall values above 0.95. These findings confirm that hydrostatic pressure-based sensing, combined with machine learning, enables reliable identification of domestic water-use events under intermittent supply conditions. The proposed approach provides actionable insights for demand management, leak detection, and user awareness, supporting more efficient and sustainable residential water consumption strategies.