Artificial Neural Network prediction of citizens' climate mitigation perception related to urban green infrastructure: The Case of Drama City in Greece:

Social perceptions and attitudes are important dimensions for the successful implementation of Green Infrastructure (GI) projects, as these are typically designed to improve environmental conditions and promote a green economy. This paper attempts to investigate social behavioral patterns of climate mitigation perceptions related to a complex and long-ongoing urban GI project in the city of Drama, which is located in northeastern Greece. A multilayer perceptron Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was developed and validated to identify the climate mitigation perception of Drama citizens with an emphasis on Human Thermal Comfort improvement aimed through the GI project implementation. The study population consisted of 200 respondents of which 70% formed the training set and 30% the test set. The input variables included the level of information about the GI project, the education level, the residence location, the awareness about the importance of the GI's expected effect on the aesthetics and the functional improvement of the area, job opportunities, and the quality of life improvement. The ANN had good accuracy (92.9%), precision (94.8%), and area under the curve (85.2%). Therefore, it can be a useful tool for communicating more efficiently the expected benefits of the urban GI project and increasing its social acceptability.