Reliable forecasting of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) production is pivotal for sustainable urban management, as it enables efficient resource planning, optimized collection schedules, and reduced environmental impacts. Existing works on MSW forecasting have some limitations, such as unavailability of granular data from lower administrative units, small datasets, and limited or sometimes no consideration of important factors that can affect MSW generation, including holidays, weekends, seasonality, changes in temperature or humidity.
This work presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of four popularly used time series forecasting models, namely Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average with Exogenous Regressors (SARIMAX), Prophet, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), using a real-world MSW dataset from Sri Lanka spanning 2012–2018.
A detailed factor-wise analysis is conducted to examine waste generation behaviour considering:
- Holidays
- Weekday–weekend variations
- Seasonal patterns
- Temperature
- Humidity
The results show lower waste generation during holidays and weekends, higher generation during Summer and Winter, and comparatively lower generation during Monsoon and Post-Monsoon. Temperature and humidity do not exhibit a direct linear relationship with waste generation, although their seasonal variations are associated with the changes in waste generation across different seasons.
All model performances are evaluated using:
- Mean Absolute Error (MAE)
- Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE)
- Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE)
- Coefficient of determination (R2)
Among the evaluated models, LSTM and SARIMAX achieve the best overall forecasting performance.