doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7618-0_1586

ABSTRACT

This paper proposed a simulation model of crop growth which is effected by major nutrient factors, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Decision-making processes in agriculture often require reliable crop yield response models to assess the impact of specific land management. Setting a realistic yield goal in each part of the field is one of the critical problems in precision agriculture. Factors affecting crop yield, such as soil, weather, and land managements, are so complex that traditional statistics cannot give accurate results. The artificial neural network (ANN) is an attractive alternative for processing the massive data set generated by precision farming production and research. This paper investigates the potential of predicting crop yield responses under varying soil and different amount of nutrients conditions by applying three different adaptive techniques, general linear models (GLMs), regression trees (RTs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs). The crop yield in GLM and RT gives only single iteration result and poorest result in terms of modeling accuracy, prediction accuracy, and model uncertainty, which might suggest its inability to model the non-linear causal relationships present in complex soil–land and crop-management interactions. The feed-forward, completely connected, back-propagation ANN was used to approximate the nonlinear yield function relating crop yield to factors influencing yield. The objective of this work is to develop an artificial neural network model to predict crop yield using a back-propagation tanning approach.

Keywords: Artificial neural networks, Regression tree, General linear model, Back-propagation, Yield prediction.

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