Occurrence of chemical substances in water supply systems of Brazil: a nonparametric approach for statistical analysis of Sisagua data

The objective of this work was to develop a methodology for statistical analysis of monitoring data of chemical compounds in drinking water supply systems in Brazil, using data from Sisagua (Drinking Water Quality Surveillance Information System). Initially, the inconsistencies in the database were...

ver descrição completa

Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Gomes, Fernanda Bento Rosa, Assunção, Taciane de Oliveira Gomes de, Nicolau, Guilherme Bento, Cordeiro, Pedro Fialho, Castro, Samuel Rodrigues, Pereira, Renata de Oliveira, Brandt, Emanuel Manfred Freire
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:Brasil
Recursos:Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM)
Repositorio:Revista Ciência e Natura (Online)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/63368
Acesso em linha:https://periodicos.ufsm.br/cienciaenatura/article/view/63368
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Censored data
drinking water
environmental data
Kaplan-Meier estimators
nondetects
Dados ambientais
Dados censurados
Estimadores de Kaplan-Meier
Não detectados
Água potável
Descrição
Resumo:The objective of this work was to develop a methodology for statistical analysis of monitoring data of chemical compounds in drinking water supply systems in Brazil, using data from Sisagua (Drinking Water Quality Surveillance Information System). Initially, the inconsistencies in the database were identified and adjusted. Then, the descriptive statistics were estimated using the Kaplan-Meier (KM) method, evaluating its applicability in different censored data sets. The descriptive parameters were compared with the substitution method. The substitution method showed susceptibility to biased estimates, especially for groups of compounds containing high percentage of censored data and with high limits of quantification and detection, leading to higher descriptive parameters compared to KM method. This work reinforces the need to use appropriate methods for analyzing environmental data and evidences that the analysis of this type of data may be complex. The methods proposed here can help environmental scientists to deal with this issue, providing a systematic procedure to check and solve consistency problems, as well as presenting a nonparametric approach for computing descriptive statistics for environmental monitoring data.