Application of Probabilistic and Machine Learning Models for Groundwater Potentiality Mapping in Damghan Sedimentary Plain, Iran

Groundwater is one of the most important natural resources, as it regulates the earth’s hydrological system. The Damghan sedimentary plain area, located in the region of a semi-arid climate of Iran, has very critical conditions of groundwater due to massive pressure on it and is in need of robust models for identifying the groundwater potential zones (GWPZ). The main goal of the current research is to prepare a groundwater potentiality map (GWPM) considering the probabilistic, machine learning, data mining, and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approaches. For this purpose, 80 wells collected from the Iranian groundwater resource department and field investigation with global positioning system (GPS), have been selected randomly and considered as the groundwater inventory datasets. Out of 80 wells, 56 (70%) wells have been brought into play for modeling and 24 (30%) for validation purposes. Elevation, slope, aspect, convergence index (CI), rainfall, drainage density (Dd), distance to river, distance to fault, distance to road, lithology, soil type, land use/land cover (LU/LC), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), topographic wetness index (TWI), topographic position index (TPI), and stream power index (SPI) have been used for modeling purpose. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC), sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP), accuracy (AC), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE) are used for checking the goodness-of-fit and prediction accuracy of approaches to compare their performance. In addition, the influence of groundwater determining factors (GWDFs) on groundwater occurrence was evaluated by performing a sensitivity analysis model. The GWPMs, produced by technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), random forest (RF), binary logistic regression (BLR), weight of evidence (WoE) and support vector machine (SVM) have been classified into four categories, i.e., low, medium, high and very high groundwater potentiality with the help of the natural break classification methods in the GIS environment. The very high groundwater potentiality class is covered 15.09% for TOPSIS, 15.46% for WoE, 25.26% for RF, 15.47% for BLR, and 18.74% for SVM of the entire plain area. Based on sensitivity analysis, distance from river, and drainage density represent significantly effects on the groundwater occurrence. validation results show that the BLR model with best prediction accuracy and goodness-of-fit outperforms the other five models. Although, all models have very good performance in modeling of groundwater potential. Results of seed cell area index model that used for checking accuracy classification of models show that all models have suitable performance. Therefore, these are promising models that can be applied for the GWPZs identification, which will help for some needful action of these areas.