RESUMO
New alternatives for effluent decontamination, such as electrochemical oxidation, are being developed to provide adequate removal of endocrine disruptors such as 17ß-estradiol in wastewater. In this study, data-driven models of response surface methodology, artificial neural networks, wavelet neural networks, and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system will be used to predict the degradation and mineralization of the microcontaminant hormone 17ß-estradiol through an electrochemical process to contribute to the treatment of effluent containing urine. With the use of different statistical criteria and graphical analysis of the correlation between observed and predicted data, it was possible to conduct a comparative analysis of the performances of the data-driven approaches. The results point to the superiority of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (correlation coefficient, R2, ranged from 0.99330 to 0.99682 for TOC removal and from 0.95330 to 0.99223 for the degradation of the hormone 17ß-estradiol) techniques over the others. The remaining results obtained with the other metrics are consistent with this analysis.