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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]

This study was conducted to assess the applicability of novel types of neural network methods (extreme learning machine (ELM), radial basis function (RBF), modified group method of data handling (M‐GMDH)) and M5 tree methods for the prediction of the soil water retention curve (SWRC) and compare their performance with that of derived methods and pedotransfer functions (PTFs) of other studies for soils in Iran. Then, 15 PTFs were developed. Predictions were evaluated by the integral root mean square error (IRMSE), integral mean error (IME), Akaike's information criterion (AIC), and coefficient of determination (R2). The RBF‐based PTFs were better than the M5 tree, M‐GMDH, and ELM‐based PTFs in terms of the IRMSE criterion in the testing step. Also, PTFs and methods developed in the present study were more reliable than other derived PTFs and methods by different researchers. The values of the IRMSE and R2 in the best PTFs (with inputs of sand, clay, total porosity and the moisture content at field capacity and permanent wilting point) of the testing data set of the RBF method were 0.037 cm3cm−3 and 0.988, respectively. For the testing data set, the average values of the IRMSE criterion for all the PTFs of the RBF, ELM, M‐GMDH, and M5 tree methods were 0.051, 0.062, 0.055, and 0.054 cm3cm−3, respectively. Therefore, the differences were considerable only between the ELM and other methods. The IRMSE criterion results of the testing data set showed the suitability of the RBF method in the development of PTFs for the prediction of the SWRC. Key Points: The radial basis function (RBF) network has strong tolerance to input noiseRBF, M5 tree, and modified group method of data handling methods were considerably better than the extreme learning machine methodThe RBF method is suitable in developing pedotransfer functions for the estimation of the soil water retention curve [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]