Exploration of machine learning approaches for paddy yield prediction in eastern part of Tamilnadu

Abstract

Agriculture is the principal basis of livelihood that acts as a mainstay of any country. There are several changes faced by the farmers due to various factors such as water shortage, undefined price owing to demand–supply, weather uncertainties, and inaccurate crop prediction. The prediction of crop yield, notably paddy yield, is an intricate assignment owing to its dependency on several factors such as crop genotype, environmental factors, management practices, and their interactions. Researchers are used to predicting the paddy yield using statistical approaches, but they failed to attain higher accuracy due to several factors. Therefore, machine learning methods such as support vector regression (SVR), general regression neural networks (GRNNs), radial basis functional neural networks (RBFNNs), and back-propagation neural networks (BPNNs) are demonstrated to predict the paddy yield accurately for the Cauvery Delta Zone (CDZ), which lies in the eastern part of Tamil Nadu, South India. The performance of each developed model is examined using assessment metrics such as coefficient of determination (R2 ), root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), coefficient of variance (CV), and normalized mean squared error (NMSE). The observed results show that the GRNN algorithm delivers superior evaluation metrics such as R2, RMSE, MAE, MSE, MAPE, CV, and NSME values about 0.9863, 0.2295 and 0.1290, 0.0526, 1.3439, 0.0255, and 0.0136, respectively, which ensures accurate crop yield prediction compared with other methods. Finally, the performance of the GRNN model is compared with other available models from several studies in the literature, and it is found to be high while comparing the prediction accuracy using evaluation metrics.