Integration of artificial intelligence with meta classifiers for the gully erosion susceptibility assessment in Hinglo river basin,Eastern India

The main aim of this study is to evaluate the gully erosion susceptibility coupling the artificial intelligence and machine learning ensemble approaches. In the present study, the multilayer perceptron neural network (MLP) was used as the base classifier and the hybrid ensemble machine learning methods i.e. Bagging and Dagging were used as the functional classifiers. The Hinglo river basin, an important tributary of the Ajay River was selected as the study area, consists with the parts of Chhotonagpur plateau and Rarh lateritic region. The study area is facing the gully erosion problems which are interrupted the growth of the agriculture. The gully erosion susceptibility maps (GESMs), prepared by MLP, MLP-Bagging and MLP-Dagging were classified into four classes such as low, moderate, high and very high susceptibility classes with the help of natural break method (NBM) in GIS environment. The very high susceptibility class covered 19.41% (MLP), 13.52% (MLP-Bagging) and 15.30% (MLP-Dagging) areas of the basin. For the evaluation and comparison of the models, receiver operating characteristics (ROC), accuracy, mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) were applied. Overall, all the gully erosion susceptibility models were performed as excellent. Integration of hybrid ensemble models with MLP has increase the accuracy of the MLP models. Among these models MLP-Dagging has achieved the highest accuracy in compare to the other models. The importance of the selected factors in the present study was assessed by the Relief-F method. The results show that the soil type factor has the highest predictive performance. Sensitivity analysis also showed soil type as most important factor. The gully erosion susceptibility maps (GESMs) are considered as the efficient tool which could be used to take the necessary steps for mitigating and controlling the soil erosion problem and sustainable environmental management and development.