Abstract

In this article the data of the groundwater quality of Aras catchment area were investigated for estimating the sodium absorption ratio (SAR) in the years 2010-2014. The artificial neural network (ANN) is defined as a system of processor elements, called neurons, which create a network by a set of weights. In the present data article, a 3-layer MLP neural network including a hidden layer, an input layer and an output layer had been designed. The number of neurons in the input and output layers of network was considered to be 4 and 1, respectively, due to having four input variables (including: pH, sulfate, chloride and electrical conductivity (EC)) and only one output variable (sodium absorption ratio). The impact of pH, sulfate, chloride and EC were estimated to be 11.34, 72.22, 94 and 91, respectively. ANN and multiple linear regression methods were used to estimate the rate of sodium absorption ratio of groundwater resources of the Aras catchment area. The data of both methods were compared with the model's performance evaluation criteria, namely root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error () and correlation coefficient. The data showed that ANN is a helpful and exact tool for predicting the amount SAR in groundwater resources of Aras catchment area and these results are not comparable with the results of multiple linear regressions. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier lnc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.