Prediction of radiation frost using support vector machines based on micrometeorological data

Abstract

Radiation frost happens frequently in the Yangtze River Delta region, which causes high economic loss in agriculture industry. It occurs because of heat losses from the atmosphere, plant and soil in the form of radiant energy, which is strongly associated with the micrometeorological characteristics. Multidimensional and nonlinear micrometeorological data enhances the difficulty in predicting the radiation frost. Support vector machines (SVMs), a type of algorithms, can be supervised learning which widely be employed for classification or regression problems in research of precisionagriculture. This paper is the first attempt of using SVMs to build prediction models for radiation frost. Thirty-two kinds of micrometeorological parameters, such as daily mean temperature at six heights (Tmean0.5, Tmean1.5, Tmean2.0, Tmean3.0, Tmean4.5 and Tmean6.0), daily maximum and minimum temperatures at six heights (Tmax0.5, Tmax1.5, Tmax2.0, Tmax3.0, Tmax4.5 and Tmax6.0, and Tmin0.5, Tmin1.5, Tmin2.0, Tmin3.0, Tmin4.5 and Tmin6.0), daily mean relative humidity at six heights (RH0.5, RH1.5, RH2.0, RH3.0, RH4.5 and RH6.0), net radiation (Rn), downward short-wave radiation (Rsd), downward long-wave radiation (Rld), upward long-wave radiation (Rlu), upward short-wave radiation (Rsu), soil temperature (Tsoil) and soil heat flux (G) and daily average wind speed (u) were collected from November 2016 to July 2018. Six combinations inputs were used as the basis dataset for testing and training. Three types of kernel functions, such as linear kernel, radial basis function kernel and polynomial kernel function were used to develop the SVMs models. Five-fold cross validation was conducted for model fitting on training dataset to alleviate over-fitting and make prediction results more reliable. The results showed that an SVM with the radial basis function kernel (SVM-BRF) model with all the 32 micrometeorological data obtained high prediction accuracy in training and testing sets. When the single type of data (temperature, humidity and radiation data) was used for the SVM without any functions, prediction accuracy was better than that with functions. The SVM-BRF model had the best prediction accuracy when using the multidimensional and nonlinear micrometeorological data. Considering the complexity level of the model and the accuracy of prediction, micrometeorological data at the canopy height with the SVM-BRF model has been recommended for radiation frost prediction in Yangtze River Delta and probably could be applied in elsewhere with the similar terrains and micro-climates.