THE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR ESTIMATING SOIL RESISTANCE TO PENETRATION

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to present and to evaluate methodologies for the estimation of soil resistance to penetration (RP) using artificial intelligence prediction techniques. In order to do so, a data base with values of physical-water characteristics of the soils available in the literature was used, and the performances of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) were evaluated. The models generated from the ANNs were implemented through the multilayer perceptron with backpropagation algorithm of Matlab software, varying the number of neurons in the input and intermediate layers. For the procedure from SVM, the RapidMiner software was used, varying input variables, the kernel function and the coefficients of these functions. The efficiency of the techniques was analyzed by the ratio 1:1, and later, compared to the Busscher non-linear model (Busscher, 1990). The results showed that the artificial intelligence models (ANN and SVM) are efficient and have predictive capacity superior to the Busscher model, under data conditions of soils with textural classes and different, and similar managements, although with higher performance index values for conditions of soils of the same textural class exposed to the same management.