Sensivity analysis of the effective input parameters upon the population flactuation of the sunn pest adult insect using Artificial Neural Network

The Sunn pest, Eurygaster integriceps Put. is the most important pest of wheat and barley in Iran. Many studies have shown that various biotic and abiotic environmental factors affect the population of this pest. In this study, the relationship between population density of the Sunn pest adult insect with different environmental factors including sampling date, average daily temperature, average relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction, height from sea level and degree-day was investigated. Field data were collected from two wheat farm of one-hectare in the city of Chadegan, Isfahan province. The used network type was multilayer perceptron with back propagation algorithm and the learning algorithm was Levenberg-Markvart. After sensitivity analysis due to the ease of the model and extraction of effectiveness of factors including four factors of sampling date, temperature, humidity and wind speed were selected. The results showed that a neural network with two hidden layer, 7 neuron in the first hidden layer and three neuron in the second hidden layer, as a sigmoid activation function, and a data percentage of 60, 30, 10 for training, testing and validation for prediction of population fluctuation of the Sunn pest adult insect is used (R2= 0.94).