Nationwide Research on Drinking Water Analysis

The Environmental Protection Agency sets the maximum contaminant level (MCL) to protect public health and this study investigates the nationwide drinking water quality by a water quality index constructed from water sampling data at community water systems. The analysis can help assess current drinking water standards.

Normalize the contaminant concentrations with respect to their respective MCLs and summarize to obtain a water quality index for a water system. Conduct regression analysis to see how local demographics and system characteristics relate to the water quality index.

webScrapeSystems: Web-scrape all zipcodes nationwide at United States Zipcodes (https://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org) and use the zipcodes to webscrape the water systems info at Environmental Working Group (https://www.ewg.org) and store the data in a local database.

webScrapeSamples: Use the systems info from the local database to web-scrape water sampling records at Environmental Working Group (https://www.ewg.org) and store the data in a local database.

CompileDatasets: Combine datasets from years 2010 to 2015 and years 2012 to 2017.

DataCleaning: Clean the data and filter for contaminants of interest.

ModelTraining: Process the data further and train a model for prediction.

Predictions: Load the trained model, make predictions, and merge the predictions back to the raw dataset.

• Webscrape 30 million+ data and cope with HTTPError
• Log transformation to ensure prediction is above 0
• only 1% of predictions above the minimum reporting limit
• Analysis incoming