Soil erosion induced by rainfall is a critical problem in many regions in the world, particularly in tropical areas where the annual rainfall amount often exceeds 2000 mm. Predicting soil erosion is a challenging task, subjecting to variation of soil characteristics, slope, vegetation cover, land management, and weather condition. Conventional models based on the mechanism of soil erosion processes generally provide good results but are time-consuming due to calibration and validation. The goal of this study is to develop a machine learning model based on support vector machine (SVM) for soil erosion prediction. The SVM serves as the main prediction machinery establishing a nonlinear function that maps considered influencing factors to accurate predictions. In addition, in order to improve the accuracy of the model, the history-based adaptive differential evolution with linear population size reduction and population-wide inertia term (L-SHADE-PWI) is employed to find an optimal set of parameters for SVM. Thus, the proposed method, named L-SHADE-PWI-SVM, is an integration of machine learning and metaheuristic optimization. For the purpose of training and testing the method, a dataset consisting of 236 samples of soil erosion in Northwest Vietnam is collected with 10 influencing factors. The training set includes 90% of the original dataset; the rest of the dataset is reserved for assessing the generalization capability of the model. The experimental results indicate that the newly developed L-SHADE-PWI-SVM method is a competitive soil erosion predictor with superior performance statistics. Most importantly, L-SHADE-PWI-SVM can achieve a high classification accuracy rate of 92%, which is much better than that of backpropagation artificial neural network (87%) and radial basis function artificial neural network (78%).
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