An intelligent system based on kernel methods for crop yield prediction

Abstract

This paper presents work on developing a software system for predicting crop yield from climate and plantation data. At the core of this system is a method for unsupervised partitioning of data for finding spatio-temporal patterns in climate data using kernel methods which offer strength to deal with complex data. For this purpose, a robust weighted kernel k-means algorithm incorporating spatial constraints is presented. The algorithm can effectively handle noise, outliers and auto-correlation in the spatial data, for effective and efficient data analysis, and thus can be used for predicting oil-palm yield by analyzing various factors affecting the yield. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.