Comparison of Model Validation Techniques for Land Cover Dynamics in Jodhpur City

Abstract: This study investigate comparison of Land cover map to quantify the characteristics of three different land change simulation models. The land change models used for simulation are termed as Stochastic Markov (St_Markov), Cellular Automata Markov (CA_Markov) and Multi Layer Perceptron Markov (MLP_Markov) models. It is found that MLP Markov gives the best results among the three modeling techniques. After simulating the land cover dynamics, various model validation techniques such as per category method, kappa statistics and fuzzy methods have been used. A comparative study of the validation techniques has also been analyze. Fuzzy set theory is the method that seems best able to distinguish areas of minor spatial errors from major spatial errors. Based on the output results, it is recommended to use the Kappa, map comparison and fuzzy methods for model validation process. This study demonstrates the range of results for a variety of model validation techniques which can be use for future research. Keywords: Validation, Fuzzy Kappa, MLP_Markov