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Abstract

The effects of climate change increase the demand for freshwater, particularly in arid environments, considering that groundwater is an essential water resource in these regions. The main focus of this research was to generate a groundwater potential map in the Center East Desert, Egypt, using a random forest classification machine learning model. Based on satellite data, geological maps, and field survey, fifteen effective features influencing groundwater potentiality were created. These effective features include elevation, slope angle, slope aspect, terrain ruggedness index, curvature, lithology, lineament density, distance from major fractures, topographic wetness index, stream power index, drainage density, rainfall, as well as distance from rivers and channels, soil type and land use/land cover. Collinearity analysis was used for feature selection. A 100 dependent points (57 water points and 43 non-potential mountainous areas) were labeled and classified according to hydrogeological conditions in the three main aquifers (Basement, Nubian and Quaternary Aquifers). The random forest algorithm was trained using (70%) of the dependent points. Then, it was validated using (30%) and the hyper-parameters were optimized. Groundwater potential map was predicted and classified as good (5.1%), moderate (0.1%), poor (4.2%), and non-potentiality (90.6%). Sensitivity (92%), and F1-score (94%) besides accuracy (97%) are validation methods used due to the imbalanced dataset problem. The most important effective features for groundwater potential map were determined based on the random forest and the receiver operating characteristics curve. Therefore, the random forest model is helpful for delineating groundwater potential zones and can be used in similar locations worldwide.