A SCORPAN-based data warehouse for digital soil mapping and association rule mining in support of sustainable agriculture and climate change analysis in the Maghreb region

Sustainable agriculture is becoming increasingly important in the face of growing environmental challenges. One key aspect of sustainable agriculture is managing soil resources effectively. In this context, digital soil mapping (DSM) has emerged as a powerful tool to understand soil variability better and inform land management decisions. This paper proposes a comprehensive data warehouse for DSM that supports climate change analysis. Our architecture integrates frequent itemset mining (FMI) and association rules mining (ARM) to extract insights from large-scale soil data. We review related studies in soil data warehousing and ARM, identify gaps, and propose a data warehouse architecture leveraging the galaxy multidimensional model for DSM based on the SCORPAN model, which incorporates all relevant soil forming factors. We employ and compare A-priori, FP-growth, and ECLAT algorithms to efficiently mine frequent itemsets and generate association rules. Our intensive experiments evaluation demonstrates that FP-growth outperforms the other algorithms in accuracy, scalability, and speed and requires less memory. Additionally, we utilized correlation metrics for ARM, such as lift, cosine, kulc, and Imbalance ratio, to obtain the most significant and relevant association rules. These rules provide valuable insights into the complex relationships between soil properties and environmental factors, which can inform land management decisions and improve sustainable agriculture practices. This work contributes to the growing body of research on DSM and data-driven approaches to sustainable agriculture.