Applying a Fuzzy Decision Tree Approach to Soil Classification

Abstract

As one of the most important factors that interfere in peoples life, the soil is characterized by quantitative and qualitative features which describe not only the soil itself, but also the environment, the weather and the vegetation around it. Different types of soil can be identified by means of these features. A good soil classification is very important to get a better use of the soil. Soil classification, when performed manually by experts, is not a simple task, as long as the experts opinions may vary considerably. Besides, different types of soil cannot be defined deterministically. With the objective of exploring an alternative approach towards solving this problem, we investigated in this paper the application of an automatic procedure to generate a soil classifier from data, using a fuzzy decision tree induction algorithm. In order to compare the results obtained by means of the fuzzy decision tree classifier, we used two well known methods for classifiers generation: the classic decision tree induction algorithm C4.5 and the fuzzy rules induction algorithm named FURIA. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.