Soft sensor for snow density measurements

Abstract: The aim of this project was to examine if a machine learning model could be used to predict snow density from six different weather parameters. These were artificially generated snow density, air temperature, ground temperature, relative humidity, windspeed and the snow depth change. The questions asked were what parameters correlates to the snow density, what model will perform best and could this approach be a better alternative to measure snow density manually. The research was performed in the application Regression Learner in MATLAB by testing five different premade machine learning models on a dataset. The premade models were, Linear Regression, GPR Matern 5/2, SVM Medium Gaussian, Wide Neural Network and Trilayered Neural Network. Also, the project includes data collection, data cleaning, data modification, data generation, training, testing, and evaluating the models. The results show that air temperature and windspeed overall are the most important parameters and the GPR Matern 5/2 and the Wide Neural Network had the highest performance. Lastly, it was concluded that the machine learning model could be a better alternative to measuring snow density with a real sensor.