Prediction of Soil Cation Exchange Capacity Using Different Soil Parameters by Intelligent Models

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe traditional methods for the measurement of soil cation exchange capacity (CEC) are time-consuming and laborious. It is also difficult to maintain stability for long-term experiments and projects. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an indirect approach such as pedotransfer functions (PTFs) to estimate this property from more easily available soil data. The aim of this study was to compare multiple linear and nonlinear regression, classification and regression trees (C&RT), artificial neural network (ANN) model included multiple layer perceptron (MLP) and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) to develop PTFs for predicting soil CEC. Soil samples, 929, were used into two subsets for training and testing of the models. Sensitivity and statistical analyzes were conducted to determine the most and the least influential variables affecting soil CEC. The prediction capability of models was assessed by statistical indicators included the normalized root-mean-square error (NRMSE) and the coefficient of determination (R2). Results of the present investigation showed that the k-NN and ANN models had the ability to estimate soil CEC by computing easily measurable variables with a guarantee of authenticity, reliability, and reproducibility. Therefore, the results of this study provide a superior basis for predicting soil CEC and could be applied to other parts of the world with similar challenges.