ORIGINAL ARTICLE Interrelationship between geochemical elements of sediment and groundwater at Samrak Park Delta of Nakdong River Basin in Korea: multivariate statistical analyses and artificial neural network approaches S. Venkatramanan 1,2 • S. Y. Chung 2 • S. Selvam 3 • J. H. Son 4 • Y. J. Kim 5 Received: 30 November 2015 / Accepted: 27 June 2017 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017 Abstract This research was conducted at Samrak Park Delta of Nakdong River Basin in Busan Metropolitan City, Korea. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the interrelationship of geochemical elements in sediments and groundwater through multivariate statistical analyses and a multilayer perceptron artificial neural network model. The mean concentrations of chemical elements were Si (46%), Fe (16.9%), Al (15.7%), K (7.5%) and Ca (4.5%) in sedi- ments, and Na (8650 mg/L), Mg (999 mg/L), Ca (432 mg/ L), K (293 mg/L) and Cl (17,640 mg/L) in groundwater, respectively. The principal component analysis produced 3 kinds of factors with the variances of 63.37, 27.02 and 9.62%, respectively. It is suggested that the chemical components of sediments and groundwater were mainly originated from source rocks and seawater intrusion, with the minor impacts of irrigation and industry. Cluster analysis also showed that chemical elements were mainly controlled by the natural geogenic sources and seawater intrusion. Multilayer perceptron of artificial neural network (ANN) presented the good interrelationship between sedi- ment and groundwater. The determination coefficients (R 2 ) between ANN predicted values and observed values in groundwater showed the high values of 0.61–0.97 except Mg, Mn and Sr. It is revealed that the chemical components of sediment and groundwater were derived from local geological origin and from the minor impact of anthro- pogenic sources. Multivariate analyses and ANN con- tributed to the identification of the mutual relationship between the geochemical elements of sediment and those of groundwater. Keywords Geochemical elements Á Sediments Á Groundwater Á Nakdong River Basin Á Multivariate statistical analyses Á Artificial neural network Introduction Large delta of the world was developed in Nile River of Egypt, Amazon River of Brazil, Yangtze River of China, Ganges River of India, Mekong River of Vietnam, Niger River of Nigeria, etc., long time ago. The river delta areas have been the center of people residence, industrial and economic activities in the world. People have discharged a large quantity of wastewater into rivers, estuaries and coastal environments, leading to the high accumulation of toxic elements in the deltaic region and the associated social issues in relation to a degraded environment (Abdel- Moati and El-Sammak 1997; Chung et al. 2015). The studies for the contamination of sediments and ground- water by toxic elements have largely increased in recent years. Toxic elements are now observed as an active & S. Y. Chung chungsy@pknu.ac.kr S. Venkatramanan venkat@pknu.ac.kr; venkatramanansenapathi@gmail.com 1 BK21 Plus Project of the Graduate School of Earth Environmental Hazard System, Pukyong National University, Busan 48513, Korea 2 Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Pukyong National University, Busan 48513, Korea 3 Department of Geology, V.O. Chidambaram College, Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu 628 008, India 4 Department of Groundwater and Geology, Korea Rural Community Corporation, 260 Yongji-ro, Uichang-gu, Changwon-si, Gyeongsangnam-do 51430, Korea 5 Water Resources & River Research, Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology, Goyang 411-712, Korea 123 Environ Earth Sci (2017)76:456 DOI 10.1007/s12665-017-6795-2