Design of a precise ensemble expert system for crop yield prediction using machine learning analytics

Abstract

Agriculture is facing significant challenges in the development of crop yield forecasts, which are important aspects of decision-making at the international, regional, and local levels. The area of agriculture is attracting growing attention because of increasing the demand for food supplies. To ensure future food supplies, crop yield prediction (CYP) provides the best decision-making to assist farmers in agricultural yield forecasting efficiently. Nevertheless, CYP is a difficult endeavor because of the intricacy of the underlying mechanisms and the effect of numerous factors, including weather patterns, soil characteristics, and crop management techniques. In today's era, ensemble learning (EL) approaches have recently demonstrated significant promise for enhancing the reliability and accuracy of CYP. The success of the EL techniques depends on several facts, including how the base learner models are trained and how these are combined. This study provides important insights into the EL techniques for CYP. This paper proposes an expert system model named precise ensemble expert system for crop yield prediction (PEESCYP) to predict the best crop for agricultural land. The proposed PEESCYP model employs multiple imputation by chained equation (MICE) data imputation technique to treat the missing values of the collected dataset, the isolation forest (IF) technique for outlier detection, the ant colony optimization (ACO) technique to perform feature selection, robust scaling (RS) technique to perform data normalization, and the extra tree (ET) is used for classification to overcome the variance and overfitting problem of the single classifiers. The measurements of the proposed PEESCYP model have been collected by means of accuracy, precision, recall, and F-1 score using a prepared dataset, which is collected from International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), and the proposed model is compared with different single-classifier based ML models, EL models, and various existing models available in the literature. The results of this experiment underline that the proposed PEESCYP model outperforms the others.