Extreme Gradient Boosting Regression Model for Soil Available Boron

Soil formation processes and agricultural practices determine the amount of plant-available boron (B) concentration in soils. In this study, the relationships between soil characteristics and plant-available B concentrations of 54 soil samples collected from Gelendost and Egirdir districts of Isparta province were investigated using the Spearman correlation and eXtreme gradient boosting regression (XGBoost) model. Plant-available B concentration was significantly correlated with the soils' phosphorus, potassium, copper, and electrical conductivity. The XGBoost model explained 63% of the variation in five components defining soil behavior, and one of these components showed the variance resulting from the plant-available B. The effects of explanatory variables on B concentration determined in the XGBoost model were the parameters that were also significant in the correlation analysis. The results indicated that the model could successfully estimate B availability from the routinely analyzed soil properties (Fig. 1).