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Landslides are a dangerous natural hazard that can critically harm road infrastructure in mountainous places, resulting in significant damage and fatalities. The primary purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of three machine learning algorithms (MLAs) for landslide susceptibility mapping including random forest (RF), decision tree (DT), and support vector machine (SVM). We selected a case study region that is frequently affected by landslides, the important Kamyaran–Sarvabad road in the Kurdistan province of Iran. Altogether, 14 landslide evaluation factors were input into the MLAs including slope, aspect, elevation, river density, distance to river, distance to fault, fault density, distance to road, road density, land use, slope curvature, lithology, stream power index (SPI), and topographic wetness index (TWI). We identified 64 locations of landslides by field survey of which 70% were randomly employed for building and training the three MLAs while the remaining locations were used for validation. The area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUC) reached a value of 0.94 for the decision tree compared to 0.82 for the random forest, and 0.75 for support vector machines model. Thus, the decision tree model was most accurate in identifying the areas at risk for future landslides. The obtained results may inform geoscientists and those in decision-making roles for landslide management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) is an important soil characteristic that controls water moves through the soil. On the other hand, its measurement is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive; hence Pedotransfer Functions (PTFs) are commonly used for its estimation. Despite significant development over the years, the PTFs showed poor performance in predicting Ks. Using Genetic Algorithm (GA), two hybrid Machine Learning based PTFs (ML-PTF), i.e. a combination of GA with Multilayer Perceptron (MLP-GA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM-GA), were proposed in this study. We compared the performances of four machine learning algorithms for different sets of predictors. The predictor combination containing sand, clay, Field Capacity, and Wilting Point showed the highest accuracy for all the ML-PTFs. Among the ML-PTFs, the SVM-GA algorithm outperformed the rest of the PTFs. It was noticed that the SVM-GA PTF demonstrated higher efficiency than the MLP-GA algorithm. The reference model for hydraulic conductivity prediction was selected as the SVM-GA PTF paired with the K-5 predictor variables. The proposed PTFs were compared with 160 models from past literature. It was found that the algorithms advocated were an improvement over these PTFs. The current model would help in efficient spatio-temporal measurement of hydraulic conductivity using pre-available databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting a low spatial resolution remote sensing imagery to get an accurate estimation of Land Use Land Cover is a difficult task to perform. Image fusion plays a big role to map the Land Use Land Cover. Therefore, This study aims to find out a refining method for the Land Use Land Cover estimating using these steps; (1) applying a three pan-sharpening fusion approaches to combine panchromatic imagery that has high spatial resolution with multispectral imagery that has low spatial resolution, (2) employing five pixel-based classifier approaches on multispectral imagery and fused images; artificial neural net, support vector machine, parallelepiped, Mahalanobis distance and spectral angle mapper, (3) make a statistical comparison between image classification results. The Landsat-8 image was adopted for this research. There are twenty Land Use Land Cover thematic maps were generated in this study. A suitable and reliable Land Use Land Cover method was presented based on the most accurate results. The results validation was performed by adopting a confusion matrix method. A comparison made between the images classification results of multispectral imagery and all fused images levels. It proved the Land Use Land Cover map produced by Gram–Schmidt Pan-sharpening and classified by support vector machine method has the most accurate result among all other multispectral imagery and fused images that classified by the other classifiers, it has an overall accuracy about (99.85%) and a kappa coefficient of about (0.98). However, the spectral angle mapper algorithm has the lowest accuracy compared to all other adopted methods, with overall accuracy of 53.41% and the kappa coefficient of about 0.48. The proposed procedure is useful in the industry and academic side for estimating purposes. In addition, it is also a good tool for analysts and researchers, who could interest to extend the technique to employ different datasets and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

We mapped landslide susceptibility in Kamyaran city of Kurdistan Province, Iran, using a robust deep-learning (DP) model based on a combination of extreme learning machine (ELM), deep belief network (DBN), back propagation (BP), and genetic algorithm (GA). A total of 118 landslide locations were recorded and divided in the training and testing datasets. We selected 25 conditioning factors, and of these, we specified the most important ones by an information gain ratio (IGR) technique. We assessed the performance of the DP model using statistical measures including sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, F1-measure, and area under-the-receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Three benchmark algorithms, i.e., support vector machine (SVM), REPTree, and NBTree, were used to check the applicability of the proposed model. The results by IGR concluded that of the 25 conditioning factors, only 16 factors were important for our modeling procedure, and of these, distance to road, road density, lithology and land use were the four most significant factors. Results based on the testing dataset revealed that the DP model had the highest accuracy (0.926) of the compared algorithms, followed by NBTree (0.917), REPTree (0.903), and SVM (0.894). The landslide susceptibility maps prepared from the DP model with AUC = 0.870 performed the best. We consider the DP model a suitable tool for landslide susceptibility mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phosphate (PO 4) is a major component of most fertilizers, and when erosion and runoff occur, large amounts of it enter the water bodies, causing several problems such as eutrophication. Feitsui reservoir, the primary source of water supply to Taipei, reported half of the reservoir's pollutants from nonpoint-source pollution. The value of the PO 4 in the water body fluctuates in highly nonlinear and stochastic patterns. However, conventional modeling techniques are no longer sufficiently effective in predicting accurately such stochastic patterns in the concentrations of PO 4 in water. Therefore, this study proposes different machine learning algorithms: the artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and boosted trees (BT) to predict the concentration of PO 4. Monthly measured data between 1986 and 2014 were used to train and test the accuracy of these models. The performances of these models were examined using different statistical indices. Hyperparameters optimization such as cross-validation was performed to enhance the precision of the models. Five water quality parameters were used as input to the proposed models. Different input combinations were explored to optimize the precision. The findings revealed that ANN outperformed the other three models to capture the changes in the concentrations of PO 4 with high precision where RMSE is equal to 1.199, MAE is equal to 0.858, and R2 is equal to 0.979, MSE is equal to 1.439, and finally, CC is equal to 0.9909. The developed model could be used as a reliable means for managing eutrophication problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar radiation plays a pivotal role in the energy balance at the Earth's surface, evaporation, snow melting, water requirements of plants, and hydrological control of catchments. In this work, performance of ERA-Interim (a reanalysis dataset) was examined to estimate solar radiation at Ahvaz, BandarAbbas, and Kermanshah weather stations representing the even spatial distribution over Iran using eight empirical models and an artificial intelligence-based model (SVM: Support Vector Machine). In the calibration set, SVM exhibited the best performance with RMSEs of 249, 299 and 437 J.cm−2.day−1 at the aforementioned stations, respectively. In validation set, SVM reduced the errors in the estimates of solar radiation by 2.5 and 7.3 percent compared to the best empirical model at Ahvaz station (Abdallah model, RMSE = 242 J.cm−2.day−1) and Kermanshah station (Angstrom-Prescott model, RMSE = 315 J.cm−2.day−1), respectively. During the validation at BandarAbbas station, Bahel and Abdallah model (RMSE = 309 J.cm−2.day−1), Angstrom-Prescott model (RMSE = 310 J.cm−2.day−1) and SVM (RMSE = 312 J.cm−2.day−1) showed a relatively similar performance. The results also showed that the ERA-Interim dataset can be a comparatively suitable alternative to some of the empirical models, where radiation or the input parameters of empirical models are not directly measured, with RMSEs ​​of 382.81, 320.82 and 414.1 J.cm−2.day−1 at Ahvaz, BandarAbbas, and Kermanshah stations, respectively (in validation phase); although its error rates are significant compared with the SVM model, and substituting it for artificial intelligence-based models is not recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study, estimating pan evaporation (Epan) was evaluated based on different input parameters: maximum and minimum temperatures, relative humidity, wind speed, and bright sunshine hours. The techniques used for estimating Epan were the artificial neural network (ANN), wavelet-based ANN (WANN), radial function-based support vector machine (SVM-RF), linear function-based SVM (SVM-LF), and multi-linear regression (MLR) models. The proposed models were trained and tested in three different scenarios (Scenario 1, Scenario 2, and Scenario 3) utilizing different percentages of data points. Scenario 1 includes 60%: 40%, Scenario 2 includes 70%: 30%, and Scenario 3 includes 80%: 20% accounting for the training and testing dataset, respectively. The various statistical tools such as Pearson's correlation coefficient (PCC), root mean square error (RMSE), Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), and Willmott Index (WI) were used to evaluate the performance of the models. The graphical representation, such as a line diagram, scatter plot, and the Taylor diagram, were also used to evaluate the proposed model's performance. The model results showed that the SVM-RF model's performance is superior to other proposed models in all three scenarios. The most accurate values of PCC, RMSE, NSE, and WI were found to be 0.607, 1.349, 0.183, and 0.749, respectively, for the SVM-RF model during Scenario 1 (60%: 40% training: testing) among all scenarios. This showed that with an increase in the sample set for training, the testing data would show a less accurate modeled result. Thus, the evolved models produce comparatively better outcomes and foster decision-making for water managers and planners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of remote sensing algorithms and increased access to satellite data, generating up-to-date, accurate land use/land cover (LULC) maps has become increasingly feasible for evaluating and managing changes in land cover as created by changes to ecosystem and land use. The main objective of our study is to evaluate the performance of Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC), Minimum Distance (MD), and Mahalanobis (MH) algorithms and compare them in order to generate a LULC map using data from Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 satellites. Further, we also investigate the effect of a penalty parameter on SVM results. Our study uses different kernel functions and hidden layers for SVM and ANN algorithms, respectively. We generated the training and validation datasets from Google Earth images and GPS data prior to pre-processing satellite data. In the next phase, we classified the images using training data and algorithms. Ultimately, to evaluate outcomes, we used the validation data to generate a confusion matrix of the classified images. Our results showed that with optimal tuning parameters, the SVM classifier yielded the highest overall accuracy (OA) of 94%, performing better for both satellite data compared to other methods. In addition, for our scenes, Sentinel 2 date was slightly more accurate compared to Landsat 8. The parametric algorithms MD and MLC provided the lowest accuracy of 80.85% and 74.68% for the data from Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8. In contrast, our evaluation using the SVM tuning parameters showed that the linear kernel with the penalty parameter 150 for Sentinel 2 and the penalty parameter 200 for Landsat 8 yielded the highest accuracies. Further, ANN classification showed that increasing the hidden layers drastically reduces classification accuracy for both datasets, reducing zero for three hidden layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dew point temperature (DPT) is known to fluctuate in space and time regardless of the climatic zone considered. The accurate estimation of the DPT is highly significant for various applications of hydro and agro–climatological researches. The current research investigated the hybridization of a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network with nature-inspired optimization algorithms (i.e., gravitational search (GSA) and firefly (FFA)) to model the DPT of two climatically contrasted (humid and semi-arid) regions in India. Daily time scale measured weather information, such as wet bulb temperature (WBT), vapor pressure (VP), relative humidity (RH), and dew point temperature, was used to build the proposed predictive models. The efficiencies of the proposed hybrid MLP networks (MLP–FFA and MLP–GSA) were authenticated against standard MLP tuned by a Levenberg–Marquardt back-propagation algorithm, extreme learning machine (ELM), and support vector machine (SVM) models. Statistical evaluation metrics such as Nash Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE) were used to validate the model efficiency. The proposed hybrid MLP models exhibited excellent estimation accuracy. The hybridization of MLP with nature-inspired optimization algorithms boosted the estimation accuracy that is clearly owing to the tuning robustness. In general, the applied methodology showed very convincing results for both inspected climate zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study investigates an improved version of Least Square Support Vector Machines integrated with a Bat Algorithm (LSSVM-BA) for modeling the dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration in rivers. The LSSVM-BA model results are compared with those obtained using M5 Tree and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS) models to show the efficacy of this novel integrated model. The river water quality data at three monitoring stations located in the USA are considered for the simulation of DO concentration. Eight input combinations of four water quality parameters, namely, water temperature, discharge, pH, and specific conductance, are used to simulate the DO concentration. The results revealed the superiority of the LSSVM-BA model over the M5 Tree and MARS models in the prediction of river DO. The accuracy of the LSSVM-BA model compared with those of the M5 Tree and MARS models is found to increase by 20% and 42%, respectively, in terms of the root-mean-square error. All the predictive models are found to perform best when all the four water quality variables are used as input, which indicates that it is possible to supply more information to the predictive model by way of incorporation of all the water quality variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]