Details zur Publikation

Kategorie Textpublikation
Referenztyp Zeitschriften
DOI 10.5194/soil-6-215-2020
Lizenz creative commons licence
Titel (primär) Development of pedotransfer functions for water retention in tropical mountain soil landscapes: spotlight on parameter tuning in machine learning
Autor Gebauer, A.; Ellinger, M.; Brito Gomez, V.M.; Ließ, M.
Quelle Soil
Erscheinungsjahr 2020
Department BOSYS
Band/Volume 6
Heft 1
Seite von 215
Seite bis 229
Sprache englisch
Daten-/Softwarelinks https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7UBWY
Abstract Machine-learning algorithms are good at computing non-linear problems and fitting complex composite functions, which makes them an adequate tool for addressing multiple environmental research questions. One important application is the development of pedotransfer functions (PTFs). This study aims to develop water retention PTFs for two remote tropical mountain regions with rather different soil landscapes: (1) those dominated by peat soils and soils under volcanic influence with high organic matter contents and (2) those dominated by tropical mineral soils. Two tuning procedures were compared to fit boosted regression tree models: (1) tuning with grid search, which is the standard approach in pedometrics; and (2) tuning with differential evolution optimization. A nested cross-validation approach was applied to generate robust models. The area-specific PTFs developed outperform other more general PTFs. Furthermore, the first PTF for typical soils of Páramo landscapes (Ecuador), i.e., organic soils under volcanic influence, is presented. Overall, the results confirmed the differential evolution algorithm's high potential for tuning machine-learning models. While models based on tuning with grid search roughly predicted the response variables' mean for both areas, models applying the differential evolution algorithm for parameter tuning explained up to 25 times more of the response variables' variance.
dauerhafte UFZ-Verlinkung https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=23270
Gebauer, A., Ellinger, M., Brito Gomez, V.M., Ließ, M. (2020):
Development of pedotransfer functions for water retention in tropical mountain soil landscapes: spotlight on parameter tuning in machine learning
Soil 6 (1), 215 - 229 10.5194/soil-6-215-2020