the proper management of a municipal water system is essential to sustain cities and support the water security of societies. Urban water estimating has always been a challenging task for managers of water utilities and policymakers. This paper applies a novel methodology that includes data pre-processing and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) optimized with the Backtracking Search Algorithm (BSA-ANN) to estimate monthly water demand in relation to previous water consumption. Historical data of monthly water consumption in the Gauteng Province, South Africa, for the period 2007–2016, were selected for the creation and evaluation of the methodology. Data pre-processing techniques played a crucial role in the enhancing of the quality of the data before creating the prediction model. The BSA-ANN model yielded the best result with a root mean square error and a coefficient of efficiency of 0.0099 mega liters and 0.979, respectively. Moreover, it proved more efficient and reliable than the
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