Abstract
The rapid expansion of human settlement, agricultural land and roads because of population growth in several regions of the world has contributed to the depletion of forest land. In this study, novel ensemble intelligent approaches using bagging, dagging and rotation forest (RTF) as meta classifiers of multilayer perceptron (MLP) were used to predict spatial deforestation probability (DP) in Gumani Basin, India. The success rate and correctness of prediction of the ensemble models were compared with MLP. A total of 1000 deforested pixels and 14 deforestation determining factors (DDFs) were used. The ensemble models were trained using 70% of the deforested pixels and validated with the remaining 30%. DDFs were chosen by applying the information gain ratio and Relief-F test methods. Distance to settlement, population growth and distance to roads were the most important factors. The results of DP modelling demonstrated that nearly 16.82%-12.64% of the basin had very high DP. All four models created DP maps with reasonable prediction accuracy and goodness of fit, but the best map was produced by MLP-bagging. The accuracy of the MLP neural net model was increased 2-3% after ensemble with the hybrid meta classifiers (RTF, bagging and dagging). The proposed method could be used for deforestation prediction in other areas having similar geo-environmental conditions. Furthermore, the findings might be used as a basis for future research and could help planners in forest management.