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Soils of Cyprus, Deriving a New Map From Legacy Data with Machine Learning Techniques

Event Details:

  • Date: Thursday 19th January 2017
  • Time: 16:00 - 17:00
  • Venue: The Cyprus Institute – Guy Ourisson Building, Seminar Room, 1st Floor, Athalassa Campus
  • Speaker: Corrado Camera, Energy, Environment and Water Research Center, The Cyprus Institute

*The seminar will be in English and the event is open to the public.

Fine-resolution soil maps constitute important data for many different environmental studies. Digital soil mapping techniques represent a cost-effective method to obtain detailed information about soil types and soil properties over large areas. The main objective of the study was to extend predictions from 1:25,000 legacy soil surveys (including WRB soil groups, soil depth and soil texture classes) to the larger area of Cyprus.

A multiple-trees classification technique, namely Random Forest (RF), was applied. Specific objectives were: (i) to analyze the role and importance of a large data set of environmental predictors, (ii) to investigate the effect of the number of training points, forest size (ntree), the numbers of predictors sampled per node (mtry) and tree size (nodesize) in RF; (iii) to compare RF-derived maps with maps derived with a multinomial logistic regression model, in terms of validation error (test set and independent profiles) and map uncertainty, using the confusion index and a newly developed reliability index.

The optimized RF model was run using half of the input points available (over a million).

Contact: events.cyi.ac.cy / 22 208 702

This event is part of the CyI Seminar Series.  View all CyI events.

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