Ecological Footprint Prediction based on Global Macro Indicators in G-20 Countries using Machine Learning Approaches

Paying attention to human activities in terms of land grazing infrastructure, crops, forest products and carbon impact, the so-called ecological impact (EF) is one of the most important economic issues in the world. In the present study, data from global databases were used. The ability of the penalized regression approach (PR including Ridge, Lasso and Elastic Net) and artificial neural network (ANN) to predict EF indices in the G-20 over the past two decades (1999–2018) was depicted and compared. For this purpose, 10-fold cross-validation was used to assess predictive performance and to specify a penalty parameter for PR models. Based on the results, a slight improvement in prediction performance was observed over linear regression. Using the Elastic Net model, more global macro indices were selected than Lasso. Although Lasso included only some indicators, it still had better predictive performance among PR models. Although the findings using PR methods were only slightly better than linear regression, their interest in selecting a subset of controllable indicators by shrinking the coefficients and creating a parsimonious model was apparent. As a result, penalized regression methods would be preferred, using feature selectivity and interpretive considerations rather than predictive performance alone. On the other hand, neural network-based models with higher values of coefficients of determination (R2) and values lower of RMSE than PR and OLS had significant performance and showed that they are more accurate in predicting EF. The results showed that the ANN network could provide considerable and appropriate predictions for EF indicators in the G-20 countries. predictions