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Determination of the permeability coefficient (K) of soil is considered as one of the essential steps to assess infiltration, runoff, groundwater, and drainage in the design process of the construction projects. In this study, three cost-effective algorithms, namely, artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), and random forest (RF), which are well-known as advanced machine learning techniques, were used to predict the permeability coefficient (K) of soil (10−9 cm/s), based on a set of simple six input parameters such as natural water content w (%), void ratio (e), specific density (g/cm3), liquid limit (LL) (%), plastic limit (PL) (%), and clay content (%). For this, a total of 84 soil samples data collected from the detailed design stage investigations of Da Nang-Quang Ngai national road project in Vietnam was used to generate training (70%) and testing (30%) datasets for building and validating the models. Statistical error indicators such as RMSE and MAE and correlation coefficient (R) were used to evaluate and compare performance of the models. The results show that all the three models performed well (R > 0.8) for the prediction of permeability coefficient of soil, but the RF model (RMSE = 0.0084, MAE = 0.0049, and R = 0.851) is more efficient compared with the other two models, namely, ANN (RMSE = 0.001, MAE = 0.005, and R = 0.845) and SVM (RMSE = 0.0098, MAE = 0.0064, and R = 0.844). Thus, it can be concluded that the RF model can be used for accurate estimation of the permeability coefficient (K) of the soil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The permeability coefficient (k) of soil is one of the most important parameters affecting soil characteristics such as shear strength or settlement. Thus, determining soil permeability coefficient is very crucial; however, a field test for determining this parameter is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. In this study, soft computing methods, namely, M5P and Gaussian process (GP), for estimating the permeability coefficient were constructed and compared. The results of this paper indicate that the two soft computing algorithms functioned well in predicting k. These two methods gave high accuracy of prediction capability. The determination coefficient of M5P (R2 = 0.766) was higher than that (R2 = 0.700) of GP. This implies that the M5P model is more reliable estimation than the GP model in predicting soils' permeability coefficient (k). This proves that applying these machine learning techniques can provide an alternative for predicting basic soil parameters, including the permeability coefficient of soil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of the study was to investigate performance of three soft computing models: Naïve Bayes (NB), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network classifier, and Alternating Decision Tree (ADT) in landslide susceptibility mapping of Pithoragarh District of Uttarakhand State, India. For this purpose, data of 91 past landslide locations and ten landslide influencing factors, namely, slope degree, curvature, aspect, land cover, slope forming materials (SFM), elevation, distance to rivers, geomorphology, overburden depth, and distance to roads were considered in the models study. Thematic maps of the Geological Survey of India (GSI), Google Earth images, and Aster Digital Elevation Model (DEM) were used for the development of landslide susceptibility maps in the Geographic Information System (GIS) environment. Landslide locations data was divided into a 70 : 30 ratio for the training (70%) and testing/validation (30%) of the three models. Standard statistical measures, namely, Positive Predicted Values (PPV), Negative Predicted Values (NPV), Sensitivity, Specificity, Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squire Error (RMSE), and Area under the ROC Curve (AUC) were used for the evaluation of the models. All the three soft computing models used in this study have shown good performance in the accurate development of landslide susceptibility maps, but performance of the ADT and MLP is better than NB. Therefore, these models can be used for the construction of accurate landslide susceptibility maps in other landslide-prone areas also. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]