Driven Factors Analysis of China's Irrigation Water Use Efficiency by Stepwise Regression and Principal Component Analysis

摘要

This paper introduces an integrated approach to find out themajor factors influencing efficiency of irrigation water use in China. It combinesmultiple stepwise regression (MSR) and principal component analysis (PCA) to obtainmore realistic results. In realworld case studies, classical linear regression model often involves too many explanatory variables and the linear correlation issue among variables cannot be eliminated. Linearly correlated variables will cause the invalidity of the factor analysis results. To overcome this issue and reduce the number of the variables, PCA technique has been used combining withMSR. As such, the irrigation water use status in China was analyzed to find out the five major factors that have significant impacts on irrigation water use efficiency. To illustrate the performance of the proposed approach, the calculation based on real data was conducted and the results were shown in this paper.