Testing an artificial neural network for predicting soil hydraulic conductivity

Multilinear regression has been used extensively to predict soil hydraulic properties from easily obtainable soil variables. This study investigated the performance of an artificial radial-basis neural network in predicting K(h) values from other variables. A fitting procedure was used that required only two parameters to ensure a unique solution. With a soil database the neural network was tested in solving multivariate problems. The neural network proved to be more efficient than the multilinear regression for predicting K(h) from two qualitative and five quantitative soil variables. It was also more efficient than two independent multilinear regressions, one for the sandy samples and the other for the loamy and clayey samples