Digital mapping of soil classes using different data mining techniques in Ardakan region, Yazd province

In recent years, there has been a great development in the digital soil mapping which has led to production of maps for countries and the continents. Although many studies have been conducted all over the world, few Iranian soil scientists have shown interests in digital mapping. Therefore, in the present research, different data mining techniques (i.e. regression logistic, artificial neural network, genetic algorithm, decision tree and discriminant analysis) were applied to spatial prediction of great group soils in the area covering of 72000 ha in Ardakan. In this area, by using the conditioned Latin hypercube sampling method, location of 187 soil profiles was selected, which was then described, sampled, analyzed and allocated in taxonomic classes according to soil taxonomy of America. Auxiliary data used in this study to represent predictive soil forming factors were terrain attributes, Landsat 7 ETM+ data and a geomorphologic surfaces map. Results showed that decision tree model had the highest accuracy while it could increase the accuracy of prediction up to 44% in comparison with discriminant analysis technique. Results also indicated using the taxonomic distances led to improving the overall accuracy of decision tree up to 3%. Results confirmed capability of decision tree, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithm, logistic regression, and discriminant analysis with 70%, 65%, 65%, 55%, and 47% accuracy, respectively. Moreover, results showed that decision tree model could predict soil classes in sub-great group with the overall accuracy of 84.2%.