Enhanced Soil Property Estimations from Earth Observation Data with Differential Evolution-Based Multi-Objective TSK Model

This paper introduces a novel approach integrating Differential Evolution (DE) with multi-objective optimization techniques for enhancing Type-1 Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy rule-based systems to attain both fair predictive performance and enhanced interpretability within the context of explainable artificial intelligence. The developed approach encodes the whole knowledge base into one chromosome and endeavors to concurrently optimize the prediction accuracy, the number of rules, and the selection of relevant input features. The methodology was tested on Earth observation data for the estimation of soil health parameters via infrared spectroscopy, and more concretely i) on the 2015 LUCAS topsoil dataset to predict three key soil properties (namely, soil organic carbon, clay content, and pH) from laboratory spectra, and ii) on a set of PRISMA hyperspectral images to predict soil organic carbon in a region of northern Greece. Compared to the classical Random Forest (RF) algorithm, our proposed learning algorithm attains a fair balance between accuracy and interpretability, and is statistically equivalent to RF in terms of accuracy. The findings underscore the potential of the proposed methodology in refining TSK models and its applicability in Earth observation-driven predictions, paving the way for both enhanced modeling accuracy and sparse feature selection.