Performance Improvement of Decision Tree Model using Fuzzy Membership Function for Classification of Corn Plant Diseases and Pests

Abstract

Corn is an essential agricultural commodity since it is used in animal feed, biofuel, industrial processing, and the manufacture of non-food industrial commodities such as starch, acid, and alcohol. Early detection of diseases and pests of corn aims to reduce the possibility of crop failure and maintain the quality and quantity of crop yields. A decision tree is a nonparametric classification model in statistical machine learning that predicts target variables using tree-structured decisions. The performance of this model can increase significantly if the continuous predictor variables are discretized into valid categories. However, in some cases, the result does not provide satisfactory performance. The possible cause is the ambiguity in discretizing predictor variables. The incorporation of fuzzy membership functions into the model to resolve discretization ambiguity issues. This work aims to classify diseases and pests of corn plants using the decision tree model and improve the model’s performance by implementing fuzzy membership functions. The main contribution of this work is that we have shown a significant improvement in the decision tree model performance by implementing fuzzy membership functions; S-growth, triangle, and S-shrinkage curves. The proposed fuzzy model is better than the decision tree model, with an average performance increase from the largest to the smallest; kappa (12.16%), recall (11.8%), F-score (9.71%), precision (5.08%), accuracy (3.23%), specificity (1.94%), and AUC (0.49%). The combination of bias and variance generated by the proposed model is quite small, indicating that the model is able to capture data trends well.