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Anthropogenic activities affect the water bodies and result in a drastic reduction of river water quality (WQ). The development of a reliable intelligent model for evaluating the suitability of water remains a challenging task facing hydro-environmental engineers. The current study is investigated the applicability of Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) and Genetic Programming (GP) in obtaining feature importance, and then abstracted input variables were imposed into the predictive model (the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM)) for the prediction of water quality index (WQI). The stand-alone modeling schema is compared with the proposed hybrid models where the optimum variables are supplied into the GP, XGB, linear regression (LR), stepwise linear regression (SWLR) and ELM models. The WQ data is obtained from the Department of Environment (DoE) (Malaysia), and results are evaluated in terms of determination …