Abstract
Infiltration plays a fundamental role in streamflow, groundwater recharge, subsurface flow, and surface and subsurface water quality and quantity. This study includes a comparative analysis of the two machine learning techniques; M5P model tree (M5P) and Gene Expression Programming (GEP) in predictions of the infiltration characteristics. The models were trained and tested using the 7 combination (CMB1 – CMB7) of input parameters; moisture content (m), bulk density of soil (D), percentage of the silt (SI), sand (SA) & Clay (C), and time (t), with output parameters; cumulative infiltration (CI) and infiltration rate (IR). Results suggested that GEP has an edge over M5P to predict the IR and CI with R, RMSE & MAE values 0.9343, 15.9667 mm/hr & 8.7676 mm/hr, and 0.9586, 9.2522 mm and 7.7865 mm for IR and CI, respectively with CMB1. Although the M5P model also gave good results with R, RMSE & MAE values 0.9192, 14.1821 mm/hr, & 19.2497 mm/hr, and 0.8987, 11.2144 mm & 18.4328 mm for IR and CI, respectively, but lower than GEP. Furthermore, single-factor ANOVA and uncertainty analysis were used to show the significance of the predicted results and to find the most efficient soft computing techniques respectively.