Model Development to Predict CEC Using the Intelligence Data Mining Approaches

Using easily measurable soil properties and pedotransfer functions (PTFs) is a time-saving, non-destructive and cost-saving way in the prediction of the cation exchange capacity (CEC). The purpose of this study was to compare and evaluate the regression tree (RT), multiple linear regression (MLR) and Mamdani fuzzy inference system (MFIS) in estimating CEC. For this work, 100 soil samples from unsaturated soil hydraulic database (UNSODA) data-set were used. %Organic matter (OM), bulk density (BD), the geometric mean particle diameter (dg) and fractal dimension of particle size (D) were applied as the input predictive variables. First, the type of relationship between easily measurable soil properties and CEC was investigated and, then used for the development of PTFs and fuzzy membership functions. The results showed that MLR method was developed only based on %OM (r = 0.68, p < .01) and D (r = 0.68, p < .01). While in the RT method, all of the predictive variables were appeared in the tree-like based on their correlation coefficient with CEC. The D and %OM also were considered as input variables in developing fuzzy membership functions. Results also revealed that RT method had a higher performance than MLR and MFIS in the estimation of CEC with the highest coefficient of determination (R-2 = 0.77), smallest root-mean-square error (RMSE = 5.14 meq/100(gsoil)), normalized root-mean-square error (NRMSE = 0.25 meq/100(gsoil)) and mean error (ME = -1.80 meq/100(gsoil)). In addition, the MFIS had a higher efficiency than the MLR in the CEC estimation.