# Analysis of Weighted Factors Influencing Submarine Cable Laying Depth Using Random Forest Method
## 2 Materials and Methods  
### Data Analysis and Preprocessing  
The data for this study were obtained from the construction of submarine cable laying and associated facilities in the waters of Zhejiang Province. They include important indicators such as the geographical coordinates (WGS84 Cartesian coordinates) of the cable laying, cable laying tension, entry angle, water depth during lateral force laying, and offset. In cable construction, the lateral force helps determine appropriate construction equipment and techniques to mitigate the impact of lateral forces on the cable. This ensures that the cable is not subjected to excessive lateral forces during the construction process, thereby guaranteeing construction quality and safety. The entry angle assists in identifying suitable entry points and construction strategies to prevent excessive stress and deformation when the cable is submerged, reducing the risk of damage during construction and improving efficiency. Accurate knowledge of the bending radius aids in selecting appropriate bending protection measures and construction techniques to minimize stress and damage to the cable during bending. Understanding the laying tension helps control the tension during construction, ensuring even force distribution along the cable and avoiding adverse effects caused by excessive or insufficient tension, thereby ensuring construction quality and stability. Knowledge of the water depth helps determine the appropriate laying depth and construction techniques, considering the impact of water depth on construction equipment, laying tension, and cable buoyancy, ensuring construction safety and cable performance. Understanding the offset helps in the timely adjustment of construction techniques and equipment to ensure that the cable is laid following the planned position and direction, minimizing errors and ensuring that the cable meets the design requirements after construction, thereby improving construction precision and reliability. In the process of storing submarine cable data, the deviation indicator is recorded as a combination of direction (S, N, W, E) and distance, which is treated as string data in computer language and cannot be directly used for mathematical operations. Considering that direction is also one of the factors influencing burial depth, it is necessary to retain this information. Therefore, it is proposed to use one-hot encoding to process this deviation indicator. One-hot encoding is a commonly used data encoding method that is typically used to convert discrete categorical variables into a numerical format that can be processed by computers [13]. One-hot encoding converts each categorical variable into a binary vector [14]. In this approach, N-bit registers are used to encode N states, and each state has an independent register bit, with only one bit being active at any given time [15]. Therefore, for the direction feature, after applying one-hot encoding, five mutually exclusive features will be generated. This approach not only solves the problem of handling non-numeric data but also expands the feature space. Some of the aforementioned data are presented in Table 1.  
Standardization, also known as normalization, is a commonly used technique in data preprocessing. It involves scaling the original data according to a certain proportion to ensure that the processed data exhibit certain characteristics, such as zero mean and unit variance. Standardization enables comparability among data with different scales and helps eliminate noise and outliers from the data [16]. In practical applications, two common methods for standardization are range normalization and Z-score normalization. In this study, Z-score normalization is employed. The specific steps involve calculating the mean and standard deviation of the data, and then subtracting the mean from each data point and dividing it by the standard deviation. This process yields standardized samples.