Assessment of groundwater potential modeling using support vector machine optimization based on Bayesian multi-objective hyperparameter algorithm

Today, water supply in order to achieve sustainable development goals is one of the most important concerns and challenges in most countries. For this reason, accurate identification of areas with groundwater potential is one of the important tools in the protection, management and exploitation of water resources. Accordingly, the present study was conducted with the aim of modeling and predicting groundwater potential in Markazi province, Iran using Multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS) and Support vector machine (SVM) machine learning models and using two random search (RS) and Bayesian optimization hyperparameter algorithms to optimize the parameters of the SVM model. For this purpose, 18 variables affecting the groundwater potential and 3482 spring locations were used to model the groundwater potential. Data for modeling were divided into two categories of training (70%) and validation (30%). The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) were used to evaluate the performance of the models. The results of evaluation models showed that using hyperparameters random search and Bayesian optimization were improved SVM accuracy in training and validation stages. Bayesian optimization methods are very efficient because they are consciously choosing the parameters of the model that this strategy improves the performance of the model. Evaluating accuracy in the validation stage showed that the AUC value is for MARS, SVM, RS-SVM and B-SVM models 87.40%, 88.25%, 90.73% and 91.73%, respectively. The results of assessment variables importance showed elevation, precipitation in the coldest month, soil and slope variables have the most importance in modeling groundwater potential, while aspect, profile curvature and TWI variables, have the least importance in predicting groundwater potential in Markazi province. •Hybrid model based on Support Vector machine & Bayesian Optimization Algorithm.•The model predicted well GWR by optimizing hyper-parameters using BOA.•BOA performed optimization on SVM efficient than Random Search method.•The proposed model provides superior results than other individual models.