Using MLP to Determine Abiotic Factors Inuencing the Establishment of Insect Pest Species

Abstract The use of multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) to deter-mine the signicance of climatic variables to the establishment of insect pest species is described. Results show that the MLP are able to learn to accurately predict the establishment of a pest species within a specic geographic region. Analysis of the MLP yielded insights into the contribution of the individual input variables and allowed for the identication of those variables that were most signicant in either encouraging or inhibiting establishment. I