Assessing the development level of rural areas of central district of Falavarjan County: The application of Artificial Neural Network

Planning of development programs either at macro or at micro levels, needs to obtain a proper understanding about the differences between rural areas in terms of their infrastructure, social, economic and environmental aspects; so that this understanding can contributed to policymakers and decision-makers the ability to recognize abilities, differences and deprivations of rural areas in order to organize a balanced development in the supposed areas. Therefore, the aim of this research was to assess the level of development of rural areas of central district of Falavarjan County. A survey research method was used in this study. Research population included villages with 20 and more households (26 villages) that about 376 household of these villages were selected as research sample based on Cochran Sampling. A researcher constructed questionnaire and secondary data taken from the village ID in 2010 was used to collect data that its face validity procedure was verified by faculty members of the Rural Development Management Department of Yasouj University and its reliability was also verified calculating Cronbach's Alpha reliability (0.65 ≤∝≤ 0.95). In order to assess and prioritization rural development, 24 indices in four dimensions were used: social-cultural, economic, environmental and physical-infrastructure. In order to analyze the data, the raw data were normalized and then using Artificial-Neural Network (ANN) of multi-layer feed-forward back-propagation, weight of each rural development index was obtained, respectively. Data processing was done using MATLABR2015a and SPSS22 software. The results showed that Jojil, Jowlorestan and Zefreh ranked first to third respectively and Mehrenjan Atrak and Mehrenjan ranked last in terms of rural development. The overall results of this study showed that the rural development is in a relatively favorable situation in the studied villages.