'Instituto Nacional de Investigacion y Tecnologia Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA)'
Abstract
An important issue for agricultural planning purposes is the accurate yield estimation for the numerous crops
involved in the planning. Machine learning (ML) is an essential approach for achieving practical and effective solutions
for this problem. Many comparisons of ML methods for yield prediction have been made, seeking for the most accurate
technique. Generally, the number of evaluated crops and techniques is too low and does not provide enough information
for agricultural planning purposes. This paper compares the predictive accuracy of ML and linear regression techniques
for crop yield prediction in ten crop datasets. Multiple linear regression, M5-Prime regression trees, perceptron
multilayer neural networks, support vector regression and k-nearest neighbor methods were ranked. Four accuracy
metrics were used to validate the models: the root mean square error (RMS), root relative square error (RRSE),
normalized mean absolute error (MAE), and correlation factor (R). Real data of an irrigation zone of Mexico were
used for building the models. Models were tested with samples of two consecutive years. The results show that M5-
Prime and k-nearest neighbor techniques obtain the lowest average RMSE errors (5.14 and 4.91), the lowest RRSE
errors (79.46% and 79.78%), the lowest average MAE errors (18.12% and 19.42%), and the highest average correlation
factors (0.41 and 0.42). Since M5-Prime achieves the largest number of crop yield models with the lowest errors, it is
a very suitable tool for massive crop yield prediction in agricultural plannin