JWSS - Journal of Water and Soil Science

Soft computing techniques have been extensively studied and applied in the last three decades for scientific research and engineering computing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the abilities of multilayer perceptron neural network (MLP) and neuro-fuzzy (NF) techniques to estimate the soil-water retention curve (SWRC) from Khozestan sugarcane Agro-Industries data. Sensitivity analysis was used for determining the model inputs and appropriate data subset. Also, in this paper, the van Genuchten and Fredlund and xing models were used to predict SWRC. Measured soil variables included particle size distribution, organic matter, bulk density, calcium carbonate, sodium adsorption ratio, electrical conductivity, acidity, mean weight diameter, plastic and liquid limit, resistance of soil penetration, water saturation percentage and water content for matric potentials -33, -100, -500 and -1500 kPa. The results of this study in terms of various statistical indices indicated that both MLP and NF provide good predictions but the neural network provides better predictions than neuro-fuzzy model. For example, using MLP and NF models values of NMSE at prediction θs, θr, α, n and m in Fredlund and Xing equation corresponded to (0.059, 0.065), (0.154, 0.162), (0.109, 0.117), (0.129, 0.135) and (0.129, 0.145), respectively. Furthermore, α and n parameters at the first depth, and θr and α parameters at the second depth in Fredlund and Xing equation were estimated with higher accuracy compared with equivalent parameters in van Genuchten equation