Predicting the Presence of Newt-Amphibian Using Genetic Programming

Abstract

In nature, aquatic ecosystems play a very important aspect. River valleys, wetlands, and water reservoirs are territories for various species of vegetation and wildlife. The prediction of these species is very important for natural resource planning. In this work, a publicly available UCI dataset containing extracted features from satellite imagery is used to classify the presence of newt-amphibians. We convert this multi-class classification problem to the binary classification problem. The transformation leads to being unbalanced classification problem. For the unbalanced classification, in the original form, most machine learning techniques give biased classification results, and their results are inclined in favor of the majority class. We use genetic programming with a newly proposed Euclidean distance and weight-based (EDWB) fitness function to resolve this problem. The result outcomes are compared with original work, support vector machine (SVM), and GP with the standard fitness function. The proposed approach achieves better results than the original work, SVM, and compared GP methods. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.