Abstract
An incorporative framework is proposed in this study for crop yield modelling and forecasting. It is a complementary approach to traditional time series analysis on modelling and forecasting by treating crop yield and associated factors as a non-temporal collection. Statistics are used to identify the highly related factor(s) among many associates to crop yield and then play a key role in data cleaning and a supporting role in data expansion, if necessary, for neural network training and testing. Wheat yield and associated plantation area, rainfall and temperature in Queensland of Australia over 100 years are used to test this incorporative approach. The results show that well-trained multilayer perceptron models can simulate the wheat production through given plantation areas with a mean absolute error (MAE) of ~2%, whereas the third-order polynomial correlation returns an MAE of ~20%. However, statistical analysis plays a key role in identifying the most related factor, detecting outliers, determining the general trend of wheat yield with respect to plantation area and supporting data expansion for neural network training and testing. The combination of these two methods provides both meaningful qualitative and accurate quantitative data analysis and forecasting. This incorporative approach can also be useful in data modelling and forecasting in other applications due to its generic nature.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Jame YW, Cutforth HW (1996) Crop growth models for decision support systems. Can J Plant Sci 76:9–19
Yun JI (2003) Predicting regional rice production in South Korea using spatial data and crop-growth modelling. Agric Syst 77:23–38
Tao F, Yokozawa M, Zhang Z, Xu Y, Hayashi Y (2005) Remote sensing of crop production in China by production efficiency models: Models comparisons, estimates and uncertainties. Ecol Model 183:385–396
Box G, Jenkins G (1970) Time series analysis: Forecasting and control. Holden Day, San Francisco
Shephard N (1995) Generalized linear autoregression. Economics working paper 8, Nuffield College, Oxford
Adya M, Collopy F (1998) How effective are neural networks at forecasting and prediction? A review and evaluation. J Forecast 17:481–495
Liang F (2005) Bayesian neural networks for nonlinear time series forecasting. Stat Comput 15:13–29
Zhang GP, Kline D (2007) Quarterly time-series forecasting with neural networks. IEEE Trans Neural Netw 18:1800–1814
Zhang GP (2003) Time series forecasting using a hybrid ARIMA and neural network model. Neurocomputing 50:159–175
Taskaya-Temizel T, Casey M (2005) A comparative study of autoregressive neural network hybrids. Neural Netw 18:781–789
Yu L, Wang S, Lai K (2005) A novel nonlinear ensemble forecasting model incorporating GLAR and ANN for foreign exchange rates. Comput Oper Res 32:2523–2541
Hoogenboom G (2000) Contribution of agrometeorology to the simulation of crop production and its applications. Agric Forest Meteorol 103:137–157
He Y, Zhang Y, Zhang S, Fang H (2005) Application of artificial neural network on relationship analysis between wheat yield and soil nutrients. in: IEEE 27th annual conference on engineering in medicine and biology. Shanghai, China
Green TR, Salas JD, Martinez A, Erskine RH (2007) Relating crop yield to topographic attributes using spatial analysis neural networks and regression. Geoderma 139:23–37
de Jong E, Rennie DA (1969) Effect of soil profile type and fertilizer on moisture use by wheat grown on fallow or stubble land. Can J Soil Sci 49:189–197
Campbell CA, Zentner RP, Johnson PJ (1988) Effect of crop rotation and fertilization on the quantitative relationship between spring wheat yield and moisture use in southwest Saskatchewan. Can J Soil Sci 68:1–16
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2008) Agricultural commodities—historical data. Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra
Gately E (1996) Neural networks for financial forecasting. Wiley, London
Yale K (1997) Preparing the right data diet for training neural networks. IEEE Spectr 3:64–66
Windeatt Y, Dias K (2008) Ensemble approaches to facial action unit classification. Lect Notes Comput Sci 5197:551–559
Hornik K, Stinchcomb M, White H (1989) Multilayer feedforward networks are universal approximators. Neural Netw 2:359–366
White H (1989) Some asymptotic results for learning in single hidden layer feedforward network models. J Am Stat Assoc 84:1008–1013
Garcia-Crespo A, Ruiz-Mezcua B, Fernandez-Fdz D, Zaera R (2007) Prediction of the response under impact of steel armours using a multilayer perceptron. Neural Comput Appl 16:147–154
Li M, Guo W, Verma B, Tickle K, O’Connor J (2009) Intelligent methods for solving inverse problems of backscattering spectra with noise: A comparison between neural networks and simulated annealing. Neural Comput Appl 18:423–430
Kurtulus DF (2009) Ability to forecast unsteady aerodynamic forces of flapping airfoils by artificial neural network. Neural Comput Appl 18:359–368
Guo WW (2010) Incorporating statistical and neural network approaches for student course satisfaction analysis and prediction. Expert Syst Appl 37:3358–3365
Marquardt D (1963) An algorithm for least-squares estimation of nonlinear parameters. SIAM J Appl Math 11:431–441
Hagan M, Menhaj M (1994) Training feedforward networks with the Marquardt algorithm. IEEE Trans Neural Netw 5:989–993
Hagan M, Demuth H, Beale MH (1996) Neural network design. PWS Publishing, Boston
Demuth H, Beale M (2004) Neural network toolbox for use with Matlab. The MathWorks, Massachusetts
Demuth H, Beale M, Hagan M (2007) Neural network toolbox 5. The MathWorks, Massachusetts
Acknowledgments
L. Li and G. Whymark are thanked for their comments on the early draft of this paper. We appreciate the reviewers for their constructive feedback that brought significant improvement to this work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Guo, W.W., Xue, H. An incorporative statistic and neural approach for crop yield modelling and forecasting. Neural Comput & Applic 21, 109–117 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-011-0636-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-011-0636-0