Forecasting urban water demand in Ben Guerir Morocco using statistical and machine learning methods
摘要
Access to safe and reliable water is a major challenge for African cities facing rapid urbanization, climate change, and socio-economic transformation. In Morocco, water scarcity threatens urban resilience and development. However, a gap remains in forecasting household water demand under such evolving conditions. This study develops a data-driven framework to anticipate domestic consumption in Ben Guerir up to 2030. By combining advanced statistical and machine learning techniques, we identify household size and socio-economic profile as the main drivers of demand, while policy and technological measures have moderate but measurable effects. Both Random Forest and Generalized Additive Models achieve strong predictive accuracy (