Modeling the Ecological Footprint of Nations via Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning Models

The per capita Ecological Footprint (EF) is one of the most-widely recognized measures of environmental sustainability. It seeks to quantify the Earth’s biological capacity required to support human activity. This study uses gene expression programming and Self-organizing Maps (SOM) to predict, classify and cluster the EF of 140 nations. A Bayesian approach was used to formally test the research hypotheses. By formulating the linear regression in a probabilistic framework, a Bayesian linear regression model is derived, and a specific simulation method, i.e., Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), is utilized to estimate the model parameters. Bayesian MCMC methods allow a richer and more complete representation of complex EF data. It also provides a computationally attractive and straightforward method to develop a full and complete description of the inherent uncertainty in parameters, quantiles and performance metrics.