Sound speed prediction of seafloor sediments in the South Yellow Sea based on BP-AdaBoost model

Based on the sound speed and physical property measurements of seafloor sediments obtained in the central part of the South Yellow Sea, a multi-parameter prediction model for the sound speed of seafloor sediments based on seven parameters, including density, porosity, water content, liquid limit, plasticity index, compression coefficient, and median grain size, was developed by using the BP-AdaBoost fusion algorithm. The results show that the model, configured with 7 input layer neurons, 10 hidden layer neurons, 1 output node, a learning rate of 0.1, and 300 training iterations, achieved a correlation coefficient of 0.962. The mean absolute error (MAE) of the predicted sound speed was 10.19 m/s, and the mean relative error (MAPE) was 0.66%. These results are better than those of single-parameter and dual-parameter prediction equations and other machine learning models. The BP-AdaBoost model prediction method of sound speed of seafloor sediments established in this paper is better than the single-parameter and dual-parameter prediction equations and other prediction models, and it can provide a new way for the prediction of sound speed of seafloor sediments in the study area.