A Random Forest Machine Learning Approach for the Identification and Quantification of Erosive Events

Abstract

Predicting the occurrence of erosive rain events and quantifying the corresponding soil loss is extremely useful in all applications where assessing phenomenon impacts is required. These problems, addressed in the literature at different spatial and temporal scales and according to the most diverse approaches, are here addressed by implementing random forest (RF) machine learning models. For this purpose, we used the datasets built through many years of soil loss observations at the plot-scale experimental site SERLAB (central Italy). Based on 32 features describing rainfall characteristics, the RF classifier has achieved a global accuracy of 84.8% in recognizing erosive and non-erosive events, thus demonstrating slightly higher performances than previously used (non-machine learning) methodologies. A critical performance is the percentage of erosive events correctly recognized to the observed total (72.3%). However, since the most relevant erosive events are correctly identified, we found only a slight underestimation of the total rainfall erosivity (91%). The RF regression model for estimating the event soil loss, based on three event features (runoff coefficient, erosivity, and period of occurrence), demonstrates better performances (RMSE = 2.30 Mg ha−1) than traditional regression models (RMSE = 3.34 Mg ha−1).