The Road Pollution Impact on Zea mays: Inductive Modeling and Qualitative Assessment

The present paper describes the results of experiments with measurements of heavy metals concentrations in soil, leaves and roots of Zea mays cultivated near the major road in the area Araxos, Greece. The chain of ecological interactions is decomposed into individual subsystems with sufficiently small number of data samples describing concentrations of elements. The GMDH-based regression models are obtained and analyzed to assess different aspects of interactions within the chain “soil–roots–leaves”. The paper also represents a qualitative assessment technique to simplify analysis of the results, as well as to generalize the modeling results for different subsystems to the whole system.