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Considering the significant impact of potentially toxic elements (PTEs) on the ecosystem and human health, this paper, investigated the contamination level of four PTEs (Zn, Cu, Mo and Pb) and their mobility in sediments of Mahabad dam and river. Choosing the most effective machine learning algorithms is very important in accurately predicting bioavailability of PTEs. Therefore, four machine learning (ML) models including decision tree regression (DTR), random forest regression (RFR), multi-layer perceptron regression (MLPR) and support vector regression (SVR), were used and compared for estimating the selected PTEs bioavailability. For these models, 9 variables (total concentration, pH, EC, OM and five chemical forms F1 to F5 obtained by sequential extraction) in 100 sediment samples were considered. The results showed that contamination level decreases from Zn and Cu to Pb and Mo, but the order of the mobility coefficient of the elements in the sediment follows the trend of zinc > copper > molybdenum > lead, and variation coefficient indicated more variability of spatial distribution for Zn and Cu. Among the four tested models, DTR and RFR performed the best for predicting PTEs bioavailability variations (with roc_auc>0.9, R 2  > 0.8 and MSE>0.5), followed by MLPR and SVR. Furthermore, the relevance of the factors controlling the metals availability, evaluated using the RFR-based feature importance method and Pearson correlation, revealed that the most important physicochemical property for Zn, Cu and Mo bioavailability was pH, whereas for Pb, EC was the determinant factor. In the case of chemical speciation, F5 had an inverse correlation with the target, while F1 and F2 had a direct correlation. These fractions contributed significantly to the prediction results. This study represents the potential successful application of ML to PTEs risk control in sediments and early warning for the surrounding water PTEs contamination., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Coastal areas are at a higher risk of flooding, and novel changes in the climate are induced to raise the sea level. Flood acceleration and frequency have increased recently because of unplanned infrastructural conveniences and anthropogenic activities. Therefore, the assessment of flood susceptibility mapping is considered the most significant flood management model. In this paper, flood susceptibility identification is performed by applying the innovative Multi-criteria decision-making model (MCDM) called Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) by ensembles with Support vector machine (AHP-SVM) and Decision Tree (AHP-DT). This model combines two Representation concentration pathway (RCP) scenarios such as RCP 2.6 & RCP 8.5. The factors influencing the coastal flooding in Bandar Abbas, Iran, identified through Flood susceptibility mapping. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) has been applied to evaluate the Coastal flood conditioning factors, and ensemble machine learning (ML) approaches are employed for Coastal risk factor (CRF) prediction and classification. The statistical variances are measured through Friedman and Wilcoxon signed rank tests and statistical metrics such as Accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Among the models, AHP-DT obtained an improved AUC value of ROC as 0.95. After applying the ML models, the northern and western park of Raidak Basin River recognises very low and low flood susceptibility because of their topographic characteristics. The eastern part of the middle section fell very high and high CFSM. Observed from this result analysis, the people living nearer to the coastline are distributed by the low to medium exposure in the region of the west and middle of the considered study area. The results of this study can help decision-makers take necessary risk reduction approaches in the high-risk flooding zones of the coastal system., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Land subsidence (LS) is one of the most challenging natural disasters that has potential consequences such as damage to infrastructures and buildings, creating sinkholes, and leading to soil destruction. To mitigate the damages caused by LS, it is necessary to determine the LS-prone areas. In this paper, LS susceptibility was assessed for Kashan Plain in Iran using Random Forest (RF) and XGBoost machine learning algorithms. For the susceptibility analysis, twelve influential factors including elevation, slope, aspect, curvature, topographic wetness index (TWI), groundwater drawdown (GWD), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), distance to stream (DtS), distance to road (DtR), distance to fault (DtF), lithology, and land use were taken into account. 291 LS points were used in this study which was divided into two parts of 70% and 30% for training and testing the models, respectively. The prediction power of the models and their produced LS susceptibility maps (LSSMs) were validated using the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), R-Squared (R2), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) values. The results showed that the XGBoost had a higher R² equal to 0.9032 compared to that of the RF which was equal to 0.8355. XGBoost model had an RMSE equal to 0.3764 cm compared to that of the RF model which was equal to 0.4906 cm. MAE for the XGBoost model was 0.1217 cm and for the RF model was 0.3050 cm. Therefore, the achieved results proved that XGBoost had better performance in this research for predicting LS values based on the measured ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electricity distribution companies are in-charge-of supplying stable electric energy to urban customers over a wide geographical area. In these distribution networks, large number of Distribution-Transformers (DTs) are installed on towers or in electric-rooms with the ratings below 1000 kVA, which are the most important assets of distribution companies. Periodic maintenance and test services are not economically feasible for all in-operation transformers. Hence, estimating the remaining useful life and scheduling the maintenance times of DTs are of great technical and economic importance. An analytical approach is presented in this paper for predicting lifetime of DTs based on degree of polymerization. An appropriate Machine-Learning (ML) algorithm trained by measured data is selected for forecasting driven load according to the ambient temperature and humidity and day-hour schedules. The relation of Hot-Spot-Temperature in IEC60076∼7 is modified based on the measured data for accounting unbalanced-loading. Neutral-current is predicted using a trained ML-model. Another approach is proposed for determining times of oil filtering services aiming to minimize the maintenance cost and maximizing the remaining life. The proposed lifetime estimation method is validated by comparing its results with the damaged DT data of a sample network chosen as the case studies for this research, i.e., Bushehr province, Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs machine learning algorithms to detect tax evasion and analyzes tax data. With the development of commercial businesses, traditional algorithms are not appropriate for solving the tax evasion detection problem. Hence, other algorithms with acceptable speed, precision, analysis, and data decisions must be used. In the case of assets and tax assessment, the integration of machine learning models with meta-heuristic algorithms increases accuracy due to optimal parameters. In this paper, intelligent machine learning algorithms are used to solve tax evasion detection. This research uses an improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm to improve the multilayer perceptron neural network by finding the optimal weight and improving support vector machine (SVM) classifiers with optimal parameters. The IPSO-MLP and IPSO-SVM models using the IPSO algorithm are used as new models for tax evasion detection. Our proposed system applies the dataset collected from the general administration of tax affairs of West Azerbaijan province of Iran with 1500 samples for the tax evasion detection problem. The evaluations show that the IPSO-MLP model has a higher accuracy rate than the IPSO-SVM model and logistic regression. Moreover, the IPSO-MLP model has higher accuracy than SVM, Naive Bayes, k-nearest neighbor, C5.0 decision tree, and AdaBoost. The accuracy of IPSO-MLP and IPSO-SVM models is 93.68% and 92.24%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many applications in agriculture as well as other related fields including natural resources, environment, health, and sustainability, depend on recent and reliable cropland maps. Cropland extent and intensity plays a critical input variable for the study of crop production and food security around the world. However, generating such variables manually is difficult, expensive, and time consuming. In this work, we discuss a cost effective, fast, and simple machine-learning-based approach to provide reliable cropland mapping model using satellite imagery. The study includes four test regions, namely Iran, Mozambique, Sri-Lanka, and Sudan, where Sentinel-2 satellite imagery were obtained with assigned NDVI scores. The solution presented in this paper discusses a complete pipeline including data collection, time series reconstruction, and cropland extent and crop intensity mapping using machine learning models. The approach proposed managed to achieve high accuracy results ranging between 0.92 and 0.98 across the four test regions at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lakes play a pivotal role in the development of cities and have major impacts on the ecosystem balancing of the area. Remote sensing techniques and advanced modeling methods make it possible to monitor natural phenomena, such as lakes' water level. The ecosystem of Urmia Lake is one of the most momentous ecosystems in Iran, which is almost close-ended and has become a global environmental issue in recent years. One of the parameters affecting this lake water level is snowfall, which has a key role in the fluctuations of its water level and water resources management. Hence, the purpose of this paper is the Urmia Lake water level estimation during 2000–2006 using observed water level, snow cover, direct precipitation, and evaporation. For this purpose, Support Vector Regression (SVR), which is the most outstanding kernel method (with various kernel types), has been used. Furthermore, four scenarios are considered with different variables as inputs, and the output of all scenarios is the water level of the lake. The results of training and testing data indicate the substantial impact of snow on retrieving the water level of the Urmia Lake at the desired period, and due to the complexity of the data relationships, the Gaussian kernel generally had better results. On the other hand, Quadratic and Cubic kernels did not work well. The fourth scenario, with RBF kernel has the best results [Training: R2 = 97% and RMSE = 0.09 m, Testing: R2 = 96.97% and RMSE = 0.08 m]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper deals with optimizing the stock portfolio of active companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange based on the forecast price. This paper is based on a combination of different filtering methods such as optimization of trading rules based on technical analysis (ROC, SMA, EMA, WMA, and MACD at six levels-Very Very Weak (VVW), Very Weak (VW), Weak (W), Strong (S), Very Strong (VS), and Very Very Strong (VVS)), Markov Chains, and Machine Learning (Random Forest and Support Vector Machine) Filter stock exchanges and provide buy signals between 2011 and 2020. In proportion to each combination of filtering methods, a buy signal is issued and based on the mean-variance (M-V) model, the stock portfolio is optimized based on increasing the portfolio return and minimizing the stock portfolio risk. Based on this, out of 480 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange, 85 active companies have been selected and stock portfolio optimization is based on two algorithms, MOGWO and NSGA II. The analysis results show that the use of SVM learning machine leads to minor correlation error than the random forest method. Therefore, this method was used to predict stock prices. Based on the results, it was observed that if the shares of companies are filtered, the risk of transactions decreases, and the return on the stock portfolio increases. Also, if two filtering methods are applied simultaneously, the stock portfolio returns slightly and the risk increases. In the analysis, MOGWO algorithm has obtained 133.13% stock return rate with a risk of 3.346%, while the stock portfolio returns in NSGA II algorithm 107.73, with a risk of 1.459%. Comparison of solution methods shows that the MOGWO algorithm has high efficiency in stock portfolio optimization., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Nasrin Bagheri Mazraeh et al.)

Featured Application: The presented paper conducted a comparative analysis based on well-known MLP, SVM, DT, and RF learning methods to assess/predict the safety factor (F.S) of earthslopes. Earth slopes' stability analysis is a key task in geotechnical engineering that provides a detailed view of the slope conditions used to implement appropriate stabilizations. In the stability analysis process, calculating the safety factor (F.S) plays an essential part in the stability assessment, which guarantees operations' success. Providing accurate and reliable F.S can be used to improve the stability analysis procedure as well as stabilizations. In this regard, researchers used computational intelligent methodologies to reach highly accurate F.S calculations. The presented study focused on the F.S estimation process and attempted to provide a comparative analysis based on computational intelligence and machine learning methods. In this regard, the well-known multilayer perceptron (MLP), decision tree (DT), support vector machines (SVM), and random forest (RF) learning algorithms were used to predict/calculate F.S for the earth slopes. These machine learning classifiers have a strong capability predict the F.S under certain conditions for slope failures and uncertainties. These models were implemented on a dataset containing 100 earth slopes' stabilities, recorded based on F.S from various locations in the provinces of Fars, Isfahan, and Tehran in Iran, which were randomly divided into the training and testing datasets. These predictive models were validated by Janbu's limit equilibrium analysis method (LEM) and GeoStudio commercial software. Regarding the study's results, MLP (accuracy = 0.901/precision = 0.90) provides more accurate results to predict the F.S than other classifiers, with good agreement with LEM results. The SVM algorithm follows MLP (accuracy = 0.873/precision = 0.85). Regarding the estimated loss function, MLP obtained a 0.29 average loss in the F.S prediction process, which is the lowest rate. The SVM, DT, and RF obtained 0.41, 0.62, and 0.45 losses, respectively. This article tried to fill the gap in traditional analysis procedures based on advanced procedures in slope stability assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose a data-driven model to predict credit risks of actors collaborating within a supply chain finance (SCF) network based on the analysis of their network attributes. This can support applying reverse factoring mechanisms in SCFs. Design/methodology/approach: Based on network science, the network measures of the actors collaborating in the investigated SCF are derived through a social network analysis. Then several supervised machine learning algorithms are applied to predict the credit risks of the actors on the basis of their network level and organizational-level characteristics. For this purpose, a data set from an SCF within an automotive industry in Iran is used. Findings: The findings of the research clearly demonstrate that considering the network attributes of the actors within the prediction models can significantly enhance the accuracy and precision of the models. Research limitations/implications: The main limitation of this research is to investigate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed model within a single case. Practical implications: The proposed model can provide a well-established basis for financial intermediaries in SCFs to make more sophisticated decisions within financial facilitation mechanisms. Originality/value: This study contributes to the existing literature of credit risk evaluation by considering credit risk as a systematic risk that can be influenced by network measures of collaborating actors. To do so, the paper proposes an approach that considers network characteristics of SCFs as critical attributes to predict credit risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crash severity models play a crucial role in evaluating the influencing factors in the severity of traffic crashes. In this study, Extremely Randomised Tree (ERT) is used as a machine learning technique to analyse the severity of crashes. The crash data in the province of Khorasan Razavi, Iran, for a period of 5 years from 2013 to 2017, is used for crash severity model development. The dataset includes traffic-related variables, vehicle specifications, vehicle movement, land use characteristics, temporal characteristics, and environmental variables. In this paper, Feature Importance Analysis (FIA), Partial Dependence Plots (PDP), and Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) plots are utilised to analyse and interpret the results. According to the results, the involvement of vulnerable road users such as motorcyclists and pedestrians alongside traffic-related variables are among the most significant variables in crash severity. Results show that the presence of motorcycles can increase the probability of injury crashes by around 30% and almost double the probability of fatal crashes. Analysing the interaction of PDPs shows that driving speeds above 60 km/h in residential areas raises the probability of injury crashes by about 10%. In addition, at speeds higher than 70 km/h, the presence of pedestrians approximately increases the probability of fatal crashes by 6%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prediction of geochemical concentration values is essential in mineral exploration as it plays a principal role in the economic section. In this paper, four regression machine learning (ML) algorithms, such as K neighbor regressor (KNN), support vector regressor (SVR), gradient boosting regressor (GBR), and random forest regressor (RFR), have been trained to build our proposed hybrid ML (HML) model. Three metric measurements, including the correlation coefficient, mean absolute error (MAE), and means squared error (MSE), have been selected for model prediction performance. The final prediction of Pb and Zn grades is achieved using the HML model as they outperformed other algorithms by inheriting the advantages of individual regression models. Although the introduced regression algorithms can solve problems as single, non-complex, and robust regression models, the hybrid techniques can be used for the ore grade estimation with better performance. The required data are gathered from in situ soil. The objective of the recent study is to use the ML model's prediction to classify Pb and Zn anomalies by concentration-area fractal modeling in the study area. Based on this fractal model results, there are five geochemical populations for both cases. These elements' main anomalous regions were correlated with mining activities and core drilling data. The results indicate that our method is promising for predicting the ore elemental distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the application of two machine learning methods to model precipitable water vapor (PWV) using observations of 23 GPS stations from the local GPS network of north-west of Iran in 2011. In a first step, the zenith tropospheric delay (ZTD) and zenith hydrostatic delay (ZHD) is calculated with the Bernese GNSS software and Saastamoinen model as revised by Davis, respectively. Then, by subtracting the ZHD from the ZTD, the zenith wet delay (ZWD) is obtained at each GPS station, for all times. In a second step, ZWD is modeled by two different machine learning methods, based on the latitude, longitude, DOY, time, relative humidity, temperature and pressure. After training a Support Vector Machine (SVM) and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), ZWD temporal and spatial variations are estimated. Using the formula by Bevis, the ZWD can be converted to PWV at any time and space, for each machine learning method. The accuracy of the two new models is evaluated using control stations, exterior and radiosonde station, whose observations were not used in the training step. Also, all the results of the SVM and ANN are compared with a voxel-based tomography (VBT) model. In the control and exterior stations, ZWD estimated by the SVM (ZWD SVM) and ANN (ZWD ANN) is compared with the ZWD obtained from the GPS (ZWD GPS). Also, in the control and exterior stations, precise point positioning (PPP) is used to evaluate the accuracy of the new models. In the radiosonde station, the PWV of the new models (PWV SVM , PWV ANN) is compared with the radiosonde PWV (PWV radiosonde) and voxel-based PWV (PWV VBT). The averaged relative error of the SVM, ANN and VBT models in the control stations is 10.50%, 12.71% and 12.91%, respectively. For SVM, ANN and VBT models, the averaged RMSE at the control stations is 1.87 (mm), 2.22 (mm) and 2.29 (mm), respectively. Analysis of the results of PWV estimated by the SVM, ANN and VBT, as well as the surface precipitation obtained from meteorological stations, indicate the high accuracy of the SVM in comparison with the ANN and VBT model. In the results shown in this paper, the SVM has the best ability to accurately estimate ZWD and PWV, using local GPS network observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extended drought period with low precipitation can result in low water availability and issues for humans, animals, and plants. Drought forecasting is critical for water resource development and management as it helps to reduce negative consequences. In this study, scientometric analysis and manual comprehensive analysis on drought modelling and forecasting are used. A scientometric analysis is used to determine the current research trend using bibliometric data and to identify relevant publication field sources with the most publications, the most frequently used keywords, the most cited articles and authors, and the countries that have made the greatest contributions to the field of water resources. This paper also tries to provide an overview of water issues, such as drought classification, drought indices, historical droughts, and their impact on Asian countries such as China, Pakistan, India, and Iran. There have been many models established for this purpose and choosing the appropriate model for study is a long procedure for researchers. An appropriate, comprehensive, pedagogical study of model ideas and historical implementations would benefit researchers by helping them to avoid overlooking viable model options, thus reducing their time spent on the topic. As a result, the goal of this paper is to review drought-forecasting approaches and recommend the best models for the Asian region. The models are divided into four categories based on their mechanisms: Regression analysis, stochastic modelling, machine learning, and dynamic modelling. The basic concepts of each approach in terms of the model's historical use, benefits, and limitations are explained. Finally, prospects for future drought research in Asia are discussed as well as potential modelling techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) is the most common blood disease in children and is responsible for the most deaths amongst children. Due to major improvements in the treatment protocols in the 50-years period, the survivability of this disease has witnessed dramatic rise until this date which is about 90 percent. There are many investigations tending to indicate the efficiency of cranial radiotherapy found out that without that, outcome of the patients did not change and even it improved at some cases., Methods: the main aim of this study is predicting cranial radiotherapy treatment in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients using machine learning. Scope of this paper is intertwined with predicting the necessity of one of the treatment modalities that has been used for many years for this group of patients named Cranial Radiotherapy (CRT). For this purpose, a case study is considered at Mahak charity hospital. In this paper, our focus is on ALL patients aged 0 to 17 treated at Mahak hospital, one of the best centers for treatment of childhood malignancies in Iran. Dataset analyzed in this study is gathered by the research team from patient's paper-based files. Our dataset consists of 241 observations on patients with 31 attributes after the data cleaning process. Our designed machine learning model for predicting cranial radiotherapy treatment in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients is a stacked ensemble classifier of independently strong models with a meta-learner to tune the weights and parameters of the base classifiers., Results: The stacked ensemble classifier show highly reasonable performance with AUC of 87.52%. Moreover, the attributes are ranked based on their predictive power and the most important variable for CRT necessity prediction is the disease relapse., Conclusion: In order to conclude, derived from previous studies regarding CRT it is not only cost-effective but also more healthy to eradicate the use of CRT for the treatment of childhood ALL. Furthermore, it is valuable to increase the clinical databases by creating more synthetic health databases not only for research purposes but also for physicians to keep track of their patient's status.   , .

Pilot-scale enhanced oil recovery in hydrocarbon field development is often implemented to reduce investment risk due to geological uncertainties. Selection of the pilot area is important, since the result will be extended to the full field. The main challenge in choosing a pilot region is the absence of a systematic and quantitative method. In this paper, we present a novel quantitative and systematic method composed of reservoir-geology and operational-economic criteria where a cluster analysis is utilized as an unsupervised machine learning method. A field of study will be subdivided into pilot candidate areas, and the optimized pilot size is calculated using the economic objective function. Subsequently, the corresponding Covariance (COV) matrix is computed for the simulated 3-D reservoir quality maps in the areas. The areas are optimally clustered to select the dominant cluster. The operational-economic criteria could be applied for decision making as well as the proximity of each area to the center of dominant cluster as a geological-reservoir criterion. Ultimately, the Shannon entropy weighting and the reference ideal method are applied to compute the pilot opportunity index in each area. The proposed method was employed for a pilot study on an oil field in south west Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most common index for representing structural condition of the pavement is the structural number. The current procedure for determining structural numbers involves utilizing falling weight deflectometer and ground-penetrating radar tests, recording pavement surface deflections, and analyzing recorded deflections by back-calculation manners. This procedure has two drawbacks: falling weight deflectometer and ground-penetrating radar are expensive tests; back-calculation ways has some inherent shortcomings compared to exact methods as they adopt a trial and error approach. In this study, three machine learning methods entitled Gaussian process regression, M5P model tree, and random forest used for the prediction of structural numbers in flexible pavements. Dataset of this paper is related to 759 flexible pavement sections at Semnan and Khuzestan provinces in Iran and includes "structural number" as output and "surface deflections and surface temperature" as inputs. The accuracy of results was examined based on three criteria of R, MAE, and RMSE. Among the methods employed in this paper, random forest is the most accurate as it yields the best values for above criteria (R = 0.841, MAE = 0.592, and RMSE = 0.760). The proposed method does not require to use ground penetrating radar test, which in turn reduce costs and work difficulty. Using machine learning methods instead of back-calculation improves the calculation process quality and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By considering the increasing trend in water consumption and significant reduction of water resources in most countries of the world, groundwater resources have become very important. The Target of this study is to implement machine learning models to produce a groundwater potential map (GWPM), identify areas with higher water potential, and also identify influencing factors. Therefore, two algorithms including the random forest (RF) and support vector regression (SVR), were performed that according to the literature have a good compatibility with this type of problems, compared to the other models. Of the 351 well points available throughout the study area, 70% (245 well points) were selected as the target for training the models and the rest 30% (106 well points) were used for evaluating the models. In addition, 20 effective information layers were used for modeling. In this study, an effort was made to focus more on data preparation that is one of the most important parts of model development. The variance inflation factor (VIF) and correlation coefficient were applied to identify the dependent variables. Also, feature selection was done to identify the most influential factors. Finally, two groundwater potential map(GWPM)s were created based on these two models. By calculating the area under the curve (AUC) from the receiver operating characteristic (ROC), the prediction accuracy of the two models was calculated. The values for AUC of the two maps produced by the RF and SVR algorithms were 93.4% and 89.7%, respectively. This study improves the knowledge of groundwater potential in the study area which is one of the cities with water scarcity in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classification is an essential step for architectural historians for better understanding and typology of cultural heritage. This research aims to automatically cluster geometric ornaments of the Ilkhanid period in Iran through using machine learning It examines the application of advanced computer science tools and methods in analysis of architectural heritage by searching the possibility of clustering ornament images with machine learning into different clusters. After examining case studies of mosques, tombs or other buildings in Iran from the Ilkhanid period (1256–1335 CE), 231 images from 36 existing buildings were chosen, and after editing images, an inventory was created based on characterization of each ornament (image) containing: Buildings' Name, Region, Construction Date, Functionality, Repetition of Motifs, Material, Ornamental Types, Design Complexity, Dominant Colour, Star-Number, Geometric Shape, Geometric Lines, and Geometric Pieces. Next, these images were analysed with small-scale machine learning with the help of the visual programming toolbox Orange (http://orange.biolab.si). The results containing image groups (machine clustered images) were tested with the characterization table of ornaments, and groups of ornaments that represents a style is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soil moisture content plays a pivotal role in biomass development of vegetation coverage at various growth stages. Moisture content of the soil is considered as a crucial parameter for agricultural studies which directly leads to higher fertility rate. Remote sensing techniques, specifically Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors, provides suitable opportunity for continuous soil moisture monitoring at various spatial and temporal resolutions. In this study, field campaigns conducted to measure soil surface parameters, including soil moisture and roughness, synchronized with Sentinel-1 pass over an agricultural region near Mohammadshahr, Iran. Fieldwork for soil moisture sampling have done during plants' (canola and winter wheat) growth stages. The Gradient Boosted Regression Tree (GBRT), eXtreme Gradient Boosted (XGB), and Random Forest (RF) machine learning algorithms were employed to model the relationship between the ground measured soil moisture and polarimetric SAR derived features from Sentinel-1 imageries. The results showed promising results obtained for soil moisture estimation using the dual-polarized SAR dataset over crop-covered agricultural fields with R2 = 0.95 and RMSE = 0.023 m3 m−3 using the GBRT regression model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water balance estimation in arid and semi-arid areas is highly essential for water and irrigation management. In arid regions, around ninety percent of the rainfall that reaches the surface of earth is returned to the atmosphere by evaporation and transpiration process. Evapotranspiration (ET) estimation has been drastically improved by the help of cutting-edge technology of Remote Sensing (RS) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques. Satellite RS approaches can be advantageous in monitoring land surface processes over vast areas and different approaches have been advanced for assessing ET from moderate to low resolutions with the help of remotely-sensed data. This research demonstrated a MODIS 8-day (500m) ET downscaling technique in Moghan plain based on Landsat-8 indices (30m) and Random Forest Regression (RFR), Support Vector Regression (SVR) models. The outcome of this research showed that SVR outperformed RFR for both days. In SVR model, the accuracy assessment indices on the first and second days are respectively: RMSE= 9.28 and 8.65, rRSME= 27.85 and 63.71, MAE= 5.71 and 3.97. This study has illustrated the possibility of implementing ML methods for downscaling MODIS ET product considering their efficacy and relatively ease of execution. Nevertheless, our research has identified that the MODIS ET accuracy is the primary reason of the accuracy of the downscaled ET. Future research can investigate the utility of spatial-temporal fusion models with remotely-sensed data to ultimately improve the spatio-temporal resolution of downscaled ET maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring and mapping eroded lands by gully erosion is an essential step to control gully networks. Advances in remote sensing and aerial photography have enabled users to capture data with variant temporal and spatial resolution that is needed in different fields. In addition, introducing different types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) enabled to carry imaging payload. The orthophoto and digital elevation model (DTM) produced from aerial images taken by Aeria-X camera mounted on Sensefly eBee-X drone was employed to identify and map eroded areas by gully in Kajoo-Gargaroo watershed in Chabahar, south-eastern part of Iran. Digitizing gully boarders manually is a tiring and time-consuming process for the operators. Maximum likelihood algorithm as one of the machine learning algorithm was also used to classify orthophoto in order to extract gully borders in the study area. In this study a new algorithm based on analysing geometric features and clustering of the DTM was used to map gullies automatically. The results of the proposed method and machine learning algorithm were compared with the manually digitized gully map. Quantitative evaluation demonstrates that our proposed method reaches better overall accuracy compared to machine learning algorithm with the increase of 7.2 percent in overall accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to apply and compare the performance of the three machine learning algorithms–support vector machine (SVM), bayesian logistic regression (BLR), and alternating decision tree (ADTree)–to map landslide susceptibility along the mountainous road of the Salavat Abad saddle, Kurdistan province, Iran. We identified 66 shallow landslide locations, based on field surveys, by recording the locations of the landslides by a global position System (GPS), Google Earth imagery and black-and-white aerial photographs (scale 1: 20,000) and 19 landslide conditioning factors, then tested these factors using the information gain ratio (IGR) technique. We checked the validity of the models using statistical metrics, including sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, kappa, root mean square error (RMSE), and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). We found that, although all three machine learning algorithms yielded excellent performance, the SVM algorithm (AUC = 0.984) slightly outperformed the BLR (AUC = 0.980), and ADTree (AUC = 0.977) algorithms. We observed that not only all three algorithms are useful and effective tools for identifying shallow landslide-prone areas but also the BLR algorithm can be used such as the SVM algorithm as a soft computing benchmark algorithm to check the performance of the models in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gully erosion destroys agricultural and domestic grazing land in many countries, especially those with arid and semi-arid climates and easily eroded rocks and soils. It also generates large amounts of sediment that can adversely impact downstream river channels. The main objective of this research is to accurately detect and predict areas prone to gully erosion. In this paper, we couple hybrid models of a commonly used base classifier (reduced pruning error tree, REPTree) with AdaBoost (AB), bagging (Bag), and random subspace (RS) algorithms to create gully erosion susceptibility maps for a sub-basin of the Shoor River watershed in northwestern Iran. We compare the performance of these models in terms of their ability to predict gully erosion and discuss their potential use in other arid and semi-arid areas. Our database comprises 242 gully erosion locations, which we randomly divided into training and testing sets with a ratio of 70/30. Based on expert knowledge and analysis of aerial photographs and satellite images, we selected 12 conditioning factors for gully erosion. We used multi-collinearity statistical techniques in the modeling process, and checked model performance using statistical indexes including precision, recall, F-measure, Matthew correlation coefficient (MCC), receiver operatic characteristic curve (ROC), precision–recall graph (PRC), Kappa, root mean square error (RMSE), relative absolute error (PRSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and relative absolute error (RAE). Results show that rainfall, elevation, and river density are the most important factors for gully erosion susceptibility mapping in the study area. All three hybrid models that we tested significantly enhanced and improved the predictive power of REPTree (AUC=0.800), but the RS-REPTree (AUC= 0.860) ensemble model outperformed the Bag-REPTree (AUC= 0.841) and the AB-REPTree (AUC= 0.805) models. We suggest that decision makers, planners, and environmental engineers employ the RS-REPTree hybrid model to better manage gully erosion-prone areas in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Psychopathology research mainly focused on the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between personality and psychiatric disorders without considering the moment-to-moment dynamics of personality in response to environmental situations. The present study aimed to both cluster a young sample according to three mixed clinical conditions (poor sleep quality, depression, and somatization) and to predict the derived clusters by maladaptive personality traits and sex differences using a deep machine learning approach. Methods: A sample of 839 adults aged 18-40 years (64% female) from the west of Iran were clustered according to the mixed clinical conditions using the cluster analysis techniques. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) modeling is used to predict the derived clusters by maladaptive personality traits and biological gender. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to identify independent variables with high sensitivity specific to the derived clusters. Results: The cluster analysis techniques suggested a fully stable and acceptable four-cluster solution for Depressed Poor Sleepers, Nonclinical Good Sleepers, Subclinical Poor Sleepers, and Clinical Poor Sleepers. The ANN model led to the identification of one hidden layer with two hidden units. The results of Area under the ROC Curve were relatively to completely acceptable, ranging from.726 to.855. Anhedonia, perceptual dysregulation, depressivity, anxiousness, and unusual beliefs are the most valuable traits with importance higher than 70%. Conclusion: The machine learning approach can be well used to predict mixed clinical conditions by maladaptive personality traits. Future research can test the complexity of normal personality traits connected to mixed clinical conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effectiveness of various quantile regression (QR) and machine learning (ML) methodologies developed for analyzing the relationship between meteorological parameters and daily reference evapotranspiration (ETref) across diverse climates in Iran spanning from 1987 to 2022. The analyzed models include D-vine copula-based quantile regression (DVQR), multivariate linear quantile regression (MLQR), Bayesian model averaging quantile regression (BMAQR), as well as machine learning algorithms such as extreme learning machine (ELM), random forest (RF), M5 model Tree (M5Tree), least squares support vector regression algorithm (LSSVR), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). Additionally, empirical equations (EEs) such as Baier and Robertson (BARO), Jensen and Haise (JEHA), and Penman (PENM) models were considered. While the EEs demonstrated acceptable performance, the QR and ML models exhibited superior accuracy. Among these, the MLQR model displayed the highest accuracy compared to DVQR and BMAQR models. Moreover, LSSVR, XGBoost, and M5Tree models outperformed ELM and RF models. Notably, LSSVR, XGBoost, and MLQR models exhibited comparable performance (R2 and NSE > 0.92, MBE and RMSE < 0.5, and SI > 0.05) to M5Tree and BMAQR models across all climates. Importantly, these models significantly outperformed EEs, DVQR, ELM, and RF models in all climates. In conclusion, high-dimensional QR and ML models are recommended as promising alternatives for accurately estimating daily ETref in diverse global climate conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research, remote sensing satellite imagery has been applied to assess dynamic and static sprawl measured simultaneously via a multi-technique approach. The first technique, which evaluates dynamic sprawl, essentially measures the "magnitude" and "direction". The second technique, which evaluates static sprawl, measures the "magnitude" and "pattern". The dynamic sprawl used in this study, shows in which "direction", in what "period" and to what "extent" Kerman had sprawl. In the static sprawl, the most sprawled pattern that the city of Kerman follows is Area-Edge, followed by Aggregation, Shape and Diversity, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Natural language processing is a composition of several error‐prone and challenging tasks, including part of speech tagging, word sense disambiguation, named entity recognition, and compound verb detection. Studying intrasentence relations and roles is essential to improve the mentioned subtasks. Semi‐automatic schemes such as ontologies can be applied to clarify word's dependencies. This paper presents an ontology that is targeting to improve POS tagging, WSD, NER, and compound verb detection in Persian with extra properties that may ameliorate machine translation. The ontology is tested in combinations with several state‐of‐art algorithms on Dadegan corpus. The results show that coping semantic analysis with machine learning methods enhance relation detection and consequently precision of the mentioned subtasks, which is not widely addressed in Persian. Furthermore, the experimental results declare that the accuracy rate increases between 4.5 and 23% for different tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), the stochastic nature of influent wastewater and operational and weather conditions cause fluctuations in effluent quality. Data-driven models can forecast effluent quality a few hours ahead as a response to the influent characteristics, providing enough time to adjust system operations and avoid undesired consequences. However, existing data for training models are often incomplete and contain missing values. On the other hand, collecting additional data by installing new sensors is costly. The trade-off between using existing incomplete data and collecting costly new data results in three data challenges faced when developing data-driven WWTP effluent forecasters. These challenges are to determine important variables to be measured, the minimum number of required data instances, and the maximum percentage of tolerable missing values that do not impede the development of an accurate model. As these issues are not discussed in previous studies, in this research, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis is done to provide answers to these challenges. Another issue that arises in all data-driven modeling is how to select an appropriate forecasting model. This paper addresses these issues by first testing nine machine learning models on data collected from three wastewater treatment plants located in Iran, Australia, and Spain. The most accurate forecaster, Bayesian network, was then used to address the articulated challenges. Key variables in forecasting effluent characteristics were flow rate, total suspended solids, electrical conductivity, phosphorus compounds, wastewater temperature, and air temperature. A minimum of 250 samples was needed during the model training to achieve a great reduction in the forecasting error. Moreover, a steep increase in the error was observed should the portion of missing values exceed 10%. The results assist plant managers in estimating the necessary data collection effort to obtain an accurate forecaster, contributing to the quality of the effluent. [Display omitted] • Bayesian network is benchmarked against eight AI models to predict wastewater quality. • Bayesian networks can handle missing value in input data due to probabilistic nature. • Key variables in WWTP quality and quantity were specified. • Input data quality has a huge role in successful development of data-driven models. • The prediction error sharply increases when the portion of missing data exceeds 10%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Natural menopause is defined as the permanent cessation of menstruation that occurs after 12 consecutive months of amenorrhea without any obvious pathological or physiological cause. The age of this phenomenon has been reported to be associated with several health outcomes. Objectives: This study aimed to estimate the Age at Natural Menopause (ANM) and to identify reproductive and demographic factors affecting ANM. Methods: This cross-sectional, population-based study was conducted on 2517 post-menopausal women aged 40–70 years participating in the first phase of the PERSIAN cohort study of Kharameh, Iran, during 2014–2017. To more accurately detect the determinants of ANM, we applied multiple linear regression beside some machine learning algorithms including conditional tree, conditional forest, and random forest. Then, the fitness of these methods was compared using Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Pearson correlation coefficient. Results: The mean±SD of ANM was 48.95±6.13. Both applied forests provided more accurate results and identified more predictors. However, according to the final comparison, the conditional forest was the most accurate method which recognized that more pregnancies, longer breastfeeding, Fars ethnicity, and urbanization have the greatest impact on later ANM. Conclusions: This study found a wide range of reproductive and demographic factors affecting ANM. Considering our findings in decision-making can reduce the complications related to this phenomenon and, consequently, improve the quality of life of post-menopausal women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statins can help COVID-19 patients' treatment because of their involvement in angiotensin-converting enzyme-2. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of statins on COVID-19 severity for people who have been taking statins before COVID-19 infection. The examined research patients include people that had taken three types of statins consisting of Atorvastatin, Simvastatin, and Rosuvastatin. The case study includes 561 patients admitted to the Razi Hospital in Ghaemshahr, Iran, during February and March 2020. The illness severity was encoded based on the respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, systolic pressure, and diastolic pressure in five categories: mild, medium, severe, critical, and death. Since 69.23% of participants were in mild severity condition, the results showed the positive effect of Simvastatin on COVID-19 severity for people that take Simvastatin before being infected by the COVID-19 virus. Also, systolic pressure for this case study is 137.31, which is higher than that of the total patients. Another result of this study is that Simvastatin takers have an average of 95.77 mmHg O2Sat; however, the O2Sat is 92.42, which is medium severity for evaluating the entire case study. In the rest of this paper, we used machine learning approaches to diagnose COVID-19 patients' severity based on clinical features. Results indicated that the decision tree method could predict patients' illness severity with 87.9% accuracy. Other methods, including the K -nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm, support vector machine (SVM), Naïve Bayes classifier, and discriminant analysis, showed accuracy levels of 80%, 68.8%, 61.1%, and 85.1%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, land subsidence susceptibility was assessed for Shahryar County in Iran using the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) machine learning algorithm. Another aim of the present paper was to assess if ensembles of ANFIS with two meta-heuristic algorithms (imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and gray wolf optimization (GWO)) would yield a better prediction performance. A remote sensing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) dataset from 2019 to 2020 and the persistent-scatterer SAR interferometry (PS-InSAR) technique were used to obtain a land subsidence inventory of the study area and use it for training and testing models. Resulting PS points were divided into two parts of 70% and 30% for training and testing the models, respectively. For susceptibility analysis, eleven conditioning factors were taken into account: the altitude, slope, aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature, topographic wetness index (TWI), distance to stream, distance to road, stream density, groundwater drawdown, and land use/land cover (LULC). A frequency ratio (FR) was applied to assess the correlation of factors to subsidence occurrence. The prediction power of the models and their generated land subsidence susceptibility maps (LSSMs) were validated using the root mean square error (RMSE) value and area under curve of receiver operating characteristic (AUC-ROC) analysis. The ROC results showed that ANFIS-ICA had the best accuracy (0.932) among the models (ANFIS-GWO (0.926), ANFIS (0.908)). The results of this work showed that optimizing ANFIS with meta-heuristics considerably improves LSSM accuracy although ANFIS alone had an acceptable result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important features of a reliable power system is its capability to supply the demand continuously. This continuous supply has been maintained by the transient stability of the system against large disturbances. The study of this type of stability is examined through different indicators. One of the common indicators to evaluate the transient stability of the power system is the well-known Critical Clearing Time (CCT) index. Conventional methods for calculating CCT have presented good accuracy, however, their computational cost is very high which makes them not suitable for real-time applications and real large-scale networks. Considering their ability to feature extraction of big data, deep neural networks can be utilized as reliable tools to cover these deficiencies. In this regard, to cover the shortcomings of the conventional methods, this paper proposes a method based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to estimate the CCT index in real-time power system applications. Moreover, to analyze a realistic case, nonlinear limiters of the excitation systems which have a considerable effect on transient stability index are considered in this study. Thanks to the using of several deep layers and the comprehensive established database, the accuracy of proposed method is appropriately high. Numerical studies on IEEE standard networks as well as a real case in Iran Power Grid (IPG) represents the advantages of the proposed method. • A deep-learning-based convolutional neural network is designed to estimate CCT index of power system. • Nonlinear limiters of the excitation system are taken into account. • A real case study in Iran grid is considered for simulation. • As a result, the transient stability of system is accurately determined in on-line manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a comprehensive solution for dry municipal solid waste (MSW) management with describes the scenario of the gasification process. For this purpose, the potential of implementing the MSW gasification process in Southeast Asia (Iran) with three agents of air, steam, and air-steam is investigated. In order to manage the MSW gasification process as accurately as possible in the study area, a thermodynamic, exergy, economic, environmental, carbon footprint, water footprint, ecological emergy, and risk assessment for the three mentioned gasification agents were carried out in the most populated cities of Iran. In the capital of Iran (Tehran) with the largest population and as a result of largest MSW production, the potential of the gasification process has been investigated at different times (10 consecutive years and 12 months of a year). Finally, by combining artificial neural networks and genetic programming, comprehensive relationships have been established to predict the thermodynamic conditions of gasification with an air-steam agent. The general results of the survey indicate that gasification with air agents has good potential for most regions. The use of the steam agent has created worse economic, environmental, and risk conditions than the other two agents. Investigating the potential of the gasification process in Tehran shows that this city has a good potential to implement this process compared to other cities in Iran, and the most suitable location for establishing the gasification process is the 4th region of this city. [Display omitted] • Potential of municipal solid waste (MSW) gasification for all Iranian cities. • Comparison of using air, steam, and air-steam agents for MSW gasification. • The payback period of air agent MSW gasification is lower than other agents. • Machine Learning used for prediction of the behavior of MSW gasification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shear wave transit time is a crucial parameter in petroleum engineering and geomechanical modeling with significant implications for reservoir performance and rock behavior prediction. Without accurate shear wave velocity information, geomechanical models are unable to fully characterize reservoir rock behavior, impacting operations such as hydraulic fracturing, production planning, and well stimulation. While traditional direct measurement methods are accurate but resource-intensive, indirect methods utilizing seismic and petrophysical data, as well as artificial intelligence algorithms, offer viable alternatives for shear wave velocity estimation. Machine learning algorithms have been proposed to predict shear wave velocity. However, until now, a comprehensive comparison has not been made on the common methods of machine learning that had an acceptable performance in previous researches. This research focuses on the prediction of shear wave transit time using prevalent machine learning techniques, along with a comparative analysis of these methods. To predict this parameter, various input features have been employed: compressional wave transit time, density, porosity, depth, Caliper log, and Gamma-ray log. Among the employed methods, the random forest approach demonstrated the most favorable performance, yielding R-squared and RMSE values of 0.9495 and 9.4567, respectively. Furthermore, the artificial neural network, LSBoost, Bayesian, multivariate regression, and support vector machine techniques achieved R-squared values of 0.878, 0.8583, 0.8471, 0.847 and 0.7975, RMSE values of 22.4068, 27.8158, 28.0138, 28.0240 and 37.5822, respectively. Estimation analysis confirmed the statistical reliability of the Random Forest model. The formulated strategies offer a promising framework applicable to shear wave velocity estimation in carbonate reservoirs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to identify the most influential soil and environmental factors for predicting wheat yield (WY) in a part of irrigated croplands in southwest Iran, using the FAO-Agro-Climate method and machine learning algorithms (MLAs). A total of 60 soil samples and wheat grain (1 m × 1 m) in 1200 ha of Pasargad plain were collected and analyzed in the laboratory. Attainable WY was assessed using the FAO method for the area. Pearson correlation analysis was used to select the best set of soil properties for modeling. Topographic attributes and vegetation indices were used as proxies of landscape components and cover crop to map actual WY in the study area. Two well-known MLAs, random forest (RF) and artificial neural networks (ANNs), were utilized to prepare an actual continuous WY map. The k-fold method was used to determine the uncertainty of WY prediction and quantify the quality of prediction accuracy. Results showed that soil organic carbon (SOC) and total nitrogen (TN) had a positive and significant correlation with WY. The SOC, TN, normalized different vegetation index (NDVI), and channel network base level (CHN) were recognized as the most important predictors and justifying more than 50% of actual WY. The ANNs outperformed the RF algorithm with an R² of 0.75, RMSE of 400 (kg ha-1), and RPD of 2.79, according to statistical indices. The uncertainty analysis showed that themaximum uncertainty of the predictionmap [400 (kg ha-1)] was very low compared to the mean value [4937 (kg ha-1)] of WY map. Calculation yield gap using the FAO-agro-climatic model showed that the average yield gap of the region was about 50% of actual yield. The findings of this study demonstrated that integrating simulated attainable crop growth using crop model and a set of soil and environmental covariates with the ANNs algorithm can effectively predict WY gaps in large areas with acceptable and reasonable accuracy. The study emphasizes that the implementation of efficient management practices has the potential to enhance agricultural production in the study area and similar regions. These results represent a significant advancement of sustainable agriculture and provide valuable insights for ensuring global food security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy is the standard surgical approach to detect lymph node metastasis in breast cancer. Machine learning is a novel tool that provides better accuracy for predicting positive SLN involvement in breast cancer patients. This study obtained data from 2890 surgical cases of breast cancer patients from two referral hospitals in Iran from 2000 to 2021. Patients whose SLN involvement status was identified were included in our study. The dataset consisted of preoperative features, including patient features, gestational factors, laboratory data, and tumoral features. In this study, TabNet, an end-to-end deep learning model, was proposed to predict SLN involvement in breast cancer patients. We compared the accuracy of our model with results from logistic regression analysis. A total of 1832 patients with an average age of 51 ± 12 years were included in our study, of which 697 (25.5%) had SLN involvement. On average, the TabNet model achieved an accuracy of 75%, precision of 81%, specificity of 70%, sensitivity of 87%, and AUC of 0.74, while the logistic model demonstrated an accuracy of 70%, precision of 73%, specificity of 65%, sensitivity of 79%, F1 score of 73%, and AUC of 0.70 in predicting the SLN involvement in patients. Vascular invasion, tumor size, core needle biopsy pathology, age, and FH had the most contributions to the TabNet model. The TabNet model outperformed the logistic regression model in all metrics, indicating that it is more effective in predicting SLN involvement in breast cancer patients based on preoperative data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of a data fusion system composed of a computer vision system (CVS) and an electronic nose (e-nose) was evaluated to predict key physiochemical attributes and distinguish red-fleshed kiwifruit produced in three distinct regions in northern Iran. Color and morphological features from whole and middle-cut kiwifruits, along with the maximum responses of the 13 metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) sensors of an e-nose system, were used as inputs to the data fusion system. Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that the first two principal components (PCs) extracted from the e-nose features could effectively differentiate kiwifruit samples from different regions. The PCA-SVM algorithm achieved a 93.33% classification rate for kiwifruits from three regions based on data from individual e-nose and CVS. Data fusion increased the classification rate of the SVM model to 100% and improved the performance of Support Vector Regression (SVR) for predicting physiochemical indices of kiwifruits compared to individual systems. The data fusion-based PCA-SVR models achieved validation R2 values ranging from 90.17% for the Brix-Acid Ratio (BAR) to 98.57% for pH prediction. These results demonstrate the high potential of fusing artificial visual and olfactory systems for quality monitoring and identifying the geographical growing regions of kiwifruits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate mapping of crop types is crucial for ensuring food security. Remote Sensing (RS) satellite data have emerged as a promising tool in this field, offering broad spatial coverage and high temporal frequency. However, there is still a growing need for accurate crop type classification methods using RS data due to the high intra- and inter-class variability of crops. In this vein, the current study proposed a novel Parallel-Cascaded ensemble structure (Pa-PCA-Ca) with seven target classes in Google Earth Engine (GEE). The Pa section consisted of five parallel branches, each generating Probability Maps (PMs) for different target classes using multi-temporal Sentinel-1/2 and Landsat-8/9 satellite images, along with Machine Learning (ML) models. The PMs exhibited high correlation within each target class, necessitating the use of the most relevant information to reduce the input dimensionality in the Ca part. Thereby, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was employed to extract the top uncorrelated components. These components were then utilized in the Ca structure, and the final classification was performed using another ML model referred to as the Meta-model. The Pa-PCA-Ca model was evaluated using in-situ data collected from extensive field surveys in the northwest part of Iran. The results demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed structure, achieving an Overall Accuracy (OA) of 96.25% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.955. The incorporation of PCA led to an OA improvement of over 6%. Furthermore, the proposed model significantly outperformed conventional classification approaches, which simply stack RS data sources and feed them to a single ML model, resulting in a 10% increase in OA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floods are both complex and destructive, and in most parts of the world cause injury, death, loss of agricultural land, and social disruption. Flood susceptibility (FS) maps are used by land‐use managers and land owners to identify areas that are at risk from flooding and to plan accordingly. This study uses machine learning ensembles to produce objective and reliable FS maps for the Haraz watershed in northern Iran. Specifically, we test the ability of the support vector regression (SVR), together with linear kernel (LK), base classifier (BC), and hyper‐parameter optimization (HPO), to identify flood‐prone areas in this watershed. We prepared a map of 201 past floods to predict future floods. Of the 201 flood events, 151 (75%) were used for modeling and 50 (25%) were used for validation. Based on the relevant literature and our field survey of the study area, 10 effective factors were selected and prepared for flood zoning. The results show that three of the 10 factors are most important for predicting flood‐sensitive areas, specifically and in order of importance, slope, distance to the river and river. Additionally, the SVR‐HPO model, with area under the curve values of 0.986 and 0.951 for the training and testing phases, outperformed the other two tested models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy has a strategic role in the economic and social development of countries. In the last few decades, energy demand has been increasing exponentially across the world, and predicting energy demand has become one of the main concerns in many countries. The residential and commercial sectors constitute about 34.7% of global energy consumption. Anticipating energy demand in these sectors will help governments to supply energy sources and to develop their sustainable energy plans such as using renewable and non-renewable energy potentials for the development of a secure and environmentally friendly energy system. Modeling energy consumption in the residential and commercial sectors enables identification of the influential economic, social, and technological factors, resulting in a secure level of energy supply. In this paper, we forecast residential and commercial energy demands in Iran using three different machine learning methods, including multiple linear regression, logarithmic multiple linear regression methods, and nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous input artificial neural networks. These models are developed based on several factors, including the share of renewable energy sources in final energy consumption, gross domestic production, population, natural gas price, and the electricity price. According to the results of the three machine learning methods applied in our study, by 2040, Iranian residential and commercial energy consumption will be 76.97, 96.42 and 128.09 Mtoe, respectively. Results show that Iran must develop and implement new policies to increase the share of renewable energy supply in final energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the digital soil mapping framework, machine learning (ML) algorithms are currently the most popular methods for the spatial prediction of soil properties. The fast developments of easy-to-use software implementations for a large panel of ML algorithms have encouraged comparison studies between algorithms, with the goal of ranking their performances and identifying the best ones among them. However, as no firm conclusions can be drawn about the best ML algorithm to be used in general, this suggests that combining a set of them could be a better approach. Numerous methods have been proposed to do so, most of them relying on a linear weighting of the individual algorithms. However, there are almost as many methods for linearly weighting ML algorithms as there are ML algorithms, thus leaving the problem unsolved. Moreover, these weighting methods are mostly used out-of-the-box, without paying a proper attention to the associated hypotheses. In this paper, we propose to address this issue by setting the problem in a more formal framework. Starting from classical hypotheses, it is shown how the benefit of averaging various ML algorithms can be estimated from their joint performances. Relying afterwards on the most commonly used linear weighting schemes, it is reminded that, as long as the performance metrics are based on mean square errors, the best averaging method is by essence the best linear (unbiased) predictor. Using a more general Bayesian framework, it is also shown that accounting for conditional biases when weighting ML algorithms is a key issue for obtaining improved predictions, and explicit formulas are proposed for that goal. Finally, these theoretical results are illustrated and discussed using a soil data set collected over an arid and semi-arid region in Iran where clay content, calcium carbonate equivalent, soil organic carbon and electrical conductivity were measured in topsoil samples. • Averaging results of several machine learning algorithms is beneficial. • Numerous averaging methods exist but are mostly used out-of-the-box. • The benefit of averaging depends on the correlation between prediction residuals. • Conditional biases are a key issue when averaging machine learning results. • A Bayesian approach provides the best results when conditional biases are present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inattention of economic policymakers to default risk and making inappropriate decisions related to this risk in the banking system and financial institutions can have many economic, political and social consequences. In this research, it has been tried to calculate the default risk of companies listed in the capital market of Iran. To achieve this goal, two structural models of Merton and Geske, two machine learning models of Random Forest and Gradient Boosted Decision Tree, as well as financial information of companies listed in the Iranian capital market during the years 2016 to 2021 have been used. Another goal of this research is to measure the predictive power of the four models presented in the calculation of default risk. The results obtained from the calculation of the default rate of the investigated companies show that 50 companies listed in the Iranian capital market (46 different companies) have defaulted during the 5-year research period and are subject to the Bankruptcy Article of the Iranian Trade Law. Also, the results obtained from the ROC curves for the predictive power of the presented models show that the structural models of Merton and Geske have almost equal power, but the predictive power of the Random Forest model is a little more than the Gradient Boosted Decision Tree model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fruit juices, and especially lime juice, belong to the most targeted food commodities for fraud. Therefore, reliable and cost-effective analytical methodologies need to be developed to guarantee lime juice authenticity and quality. The manifestation of machine learning techniques (MLT) has paved the way for fast and reliable processing and analysis of food and juice data for more effective use of inexpensive, readily available, and easy-to-use equipment such as UV/Vis spectrometers for quality control. The study aimed to investigate UV/Vis spectrometry and MLT to detect at least 10% of water, acid, and sugar added to lime juice. For this purpose, 26 lime samples, including Mexican and Persian lime, were collected from the orchards of four main lime-cultivated areas in Iran to prepare pure lime juice samples (as authentic samples). To investigate adulterated lime juice, four types of treatment were defined by adding acid, sugar, a mix of acid and sugar solution, and water at different volume proportions (10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 % v/v) to pure lime juice samples. Each treatment was repeated eight times. The absorption rate of different adulterated and pure lime juice samples was measured at different wavelengths in the 210-550 nm range. The evaluation results of different MLTs showed that the accuracy of separating samples using absorption data by decision tree (DT), k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), random forest (RF), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and support vector machine (SVM) were 75%, 79%, 80%, 87%, and 92%, respectively. SVM had the highest level of accuracy in separating adulterated lime juice samples. Also, this model's performance criteria (sensitivity and F-score) were higher than other models for identifying adulterated samples using absorption data. This is the first time that the common adulterations in lime juice were identified by rapid and accessible screening methods using UV/Vis spectroscopy and MLT with high accuracy, precision, and sensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the local geochemical anomalies from stream sediment samples is challenging in regional-scale exploration programs. For this purpose, some robust and reliable techniques must be applied to distinguish the geochemical targets from the background values. In this research, a procedure of several tools, including singularity mapping (SM), random forests (RF), success-rate curves, and the t-Student method, were employed to analyze the geochemical anomalies within the intrusive-plutonic Torud-Chahshirin belt (TCB), northeast Iran. In this regard, the success-rate curves were initially applied to extract efficient geochemical signatures. Then, singularity analysis was used on the selected geochemical elements (Au, Cu, Pb, and Zn), which were transformed via centered log-ratio (clr) transformation. In the next step, due to the complexity of the ore-forming processes in the TCB, the structural factors (e.g., fault intersection and faults with different orientations) were determined. Based on the success-rate curves, NE-trending faults and fault density were distinguished as critical structural criteria. Afterward, the RF model as a robust machine learning algorithm was executed on the four efficient SM-based geochemical layers and two efficient structural factors. The anomaly map derived by the RF model (Accuracy = 98.85% and Error = 1.15%) illustrates a very high relationship with Cu ± Au mineral occurrences. Therefore, the RF algorithm assisted by the singularity method is more trustworthy for highlighting the weak geochemical prospectivity areas in the TCB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We utilized the random forest (RF) machine learning algorithm, along with nine topographical/morphological factors, namely aspect, slope, geomorphons, plan curvature, profile curvature, terrain roughness index, surface texture, topographic wetness index (TWI), and elevation. Our objective was to identify flood-prone areas along the meandering Kashkan River and investigate the role of topography in riverbank inundation. To validate the flood susceptibility map generated by the random forest algorithm, we employed Sentinel-1 GRDH SAR imagery from the March 2019 flooding event in the Kashkan river. The SNAP software and the OTSU thresholding method were utilized to extract the flooded/inundated areas from the SAR imagery. The results showed that the random forest model accurately pinpointed areas with a "very high" and "high" risk of flooding. Through analysis of the cross-sections and SAR-based flood maps, we discovered that the topographical confinement of the meander played a crucial role in the extent of inundation along the meandering path. Moreover, the findings indicated that the inner banks along the Kashkan river were more prone to flooding compared to the outer banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landslide is painstaking as one of the most prevalent and devastating forms of mass movement that affects man and his environment. The specific objective of this research paper is to investigate the application and performances of some selected machine learning algorithms (MLA) in landslide susceptibility mapping, in Dodangeh watershed, Iran. A 112 sample point of the past landslide, occurrence or inventory data was generated from the existing and field observations. In addition, fourteen landslide-conditioning parameters were derived from DEM and other topographic databases for the modelling process. These conditioning parameters include total curvature, profile curvature, plan curvature, slope, aspect, altitude, topographic wetness index (TWI), topographic roughness index (TRI), stream transport index (STI), stream power index (SPI), lithology, land use, distance to stream, distance to the fault. Meanwhile, factor analysis was employed to optimize the landslide conditioning parameters and the inventory data, by assessing the multi-collinearity effects and outlier detections respectively. The inventory data is divided into 70% (78) training dataset and 30% (34) test dataset for model validation. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve or area under curve (AUC) value was used for assessing the model's performance. The findings reveal that TRI has 0.89 collinearity effect based on variance-inflated factor (VIF) and based on Gini factor optimization total curvature is not significant in the model development, therefore the two parameters are excluded from the modelling. All the selected MLAs (RF, BRT, and DT) shown promising performances on landslide susceptibility mapping in Dodangeh watershed, Iran. The ROC curve for training and validation for RF are 86% success rate and 83% prediction rate implies the best model performance compared to BRT and DT, with ROC curve of 72% and 70% prediction rate, respectively. In conclusion, RF could be the best algorithm for producing landslide susceptibility map, and such results could be adopted for the decision-making process to support land use planner for improving landslide risk assessment in similar environmental settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incidences of disease, dieback, decline or mortality, some of which induced or enhanced by climate change, threaten the sustainability of forest stands in many ecosystems. Spatially explicit prediction of disease onset remains challenging, however, due to the involvement of several causative agents. In this paper, we developed a generic framework based on machine-learning algorithms and spatial analyses for landscape-level prediction of oak disease outbreaks caused by the charcoal fungus Biscogniauxia mediterranea in a mixed-oak forest of Mediterranean climate. For prediction, we used a set of fifteen causative factors as a cross-function of soil, site and stand-related predictors. A total of 80 sample plots, including 1134 affected trees, were surveyed and used for the modeling process at the 5600-ha landscape level of the southern Zagros, Iran, where the disease occurs in roughly 25% of forest lands. Ten machine learning algorithms were explored and the performance of each algorithm to predict oak disease outbreak was evaluated. The modeling framework used maximum entropy to remove the least influential variables and build the status-quo management scenario to which the results of the prediction models were compared. Results showed that the random forests algorithm (AUC = 0.96: Precision = 0.71: Accuracy = 0.90: F-Measure = 0.70) achieved significantly better results than the status-quo management (Precision = 0.13: Accuracy = 0.67: F-Measure = 0.12) and any other algorithm. Soil chemical properties (NPK, organic carbon and EC) and landform predictors (slope, distance to roads, and TWI) were major forecasters of oak disease outbreak identified by the random forest algorithm. Geostatistical analysis enabled the creation of a map that identified sites at higher risk of infestation, allowing epidemiologists and forest managers to find sites likely to be infested. Consequently, financial resources can be allocated and management practices such as sanitation felling treatments applied across large forest landscapes to minimize the risk of spread and severity to uninfested high-value trees on nearby or adjacent land zones that are in the early stage of epidemics. • Soil and landform attributes explain short-term presence of oak charcoal disease. • Random forest (RF) algorithms outperform nine other machine learning algorithms. • RF predicts 41% of Brant's oak at moderate disease intensity in southern Zagros. • RF algorithm predicts oak dieback, decline or mortality with 96% accuracy. • Machine-learning algorithms predict spatial charcoal disease intensity in Brant's oak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formation damage poses a widespread challenge in the oil and gas industry, leading to diminished permeability, flow rates, and overall well productivity. Acidizing is a commonly employed technique aimed at mitigating damage and enhancing permeability. In this study, to predict the permeability after acidizing in oil and gas reservoirs, three machine learning models, namely artificial neural networks, random forest, and XGBoost, along with genetic programming were used to estimate permeability changes after acidizing. These models are utilized to estimate permeability changes following acidizing operations. Training of the models involved a dataset comprising 218 acidizing operations conducted in diverse reservoirs across Iran. The input parameters, namely permeability, porosity, skin factor, calcite mineral fraction, acid injection rate, and injected acid volume, were optimized through the use of a genetic algorithm. Statistical and graphical analysis of the results demonstrates that genetic programming outperformed the other machine learning techniques, yielding superior performance with R square and RMSE values of 0.82 and 17.65, respectively. Nevertheless, the other models also exhibited commendable performance, surpassing an R square value of 0.73. The post-acidizing permeability data obtained from core flooding experiments conducted on carbonate and sandstone cores was utilized to validate the models. The genetic programming model demonstrates an average error of 21.1%. The evaluation of post-acidizing permeability using genetic programming, in comparison with the results obtained from the core-flood test, revealed errors of 22.95% and 32.4% for carbonate and sandstone cores, respectively. Furthermore, a comparison between the calculated post-acidizing permeability derived from the GP model and previous studies indicated errors within the range of 8.6–26.59%. The findings highlight the potential of genetic programming and machine learning algorithms in accurately predicting post-acidizing permeability, thereby aiding in acidizing design, effectiveness assessment, and ultimately enhancing oil and gas production rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many cities in Iran, including the metropolis of Shiraz, are increasingly car-oriented, resulting in traffic congestion and related issues. Considering the current conditions of Iran, an automated transit network (ATN) can be one of the available solutions to this problem. ATN is an advanced type of public transit consisting of automated vehicles moving passengers on a network of dedicated guideways. As a combination of public, personal, and private transport, ATNs may decrease the use of cars and address related problems. In order to design effective policies aimed at achieving the benefits of ATN, it is necessary to have a better understanding of how people accept an ATN system, especially car users. This research aims at advancing future research on the effects of ATNs on travel behavior through identifying the characteristics of users who are likely to accept ATN services, by examining the heterogeneity in the preferences of these people. To achieve this goal, a stated choice survey was conducted and analyzed using multinomial logit (MNL) and mixed logit (ML) models. The results showed that the parameters of trip purpose, owning a hybrid car, and the level of education affect the preferences toward the ATN system. Additionally, from the comparison of the results of the MNL and ML models, it was found that despite the greater ability of the ML model in estimating possible heterogeneities, likely the MNL model can also help to record some heterogeneities more realistically. In the end, the methodological limitations of the study were also acknowledged. Despite the potential hypothesis bias and the status quo bias, the results captured the directionality and relative importance of the attributes of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]