Explainable ResNet50 learning model based on copula entropy for cotton plant disease prediction

This paper presents a novel Deep Learning (DL) framework for cotton plant disease prediction based on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) and Copula entropy based-Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) algorithm. The suggested framework uses a cotton plant image as input and pre-processes it to produce an image with enhanced contrast. Features are extracted from the leaf images with the ResNet50 CNN model. A crucial preprocessing model known as feature selection helps to improve the effectiveness of image classification by deleting extraneous or irrelevant features. Therefore, the Gray Wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm which is a global search method with potential use in feature selection is employed in this paper. The proposed framework introduces Copula entropy (CE) as an indicator of association to create the GWO's initial population and enhance the GWO feature engineering process. For the GWO initialization procedure, CE has been used to choose the most significant features which substantially improved the quality of the GWO starting population and as a result improved the performance of the proposed CE-based GWO algorithm by 78.57% faster than the traditional GWO as stated by the time complexity analysis. In addition, Feature importance explanation is determined using XAI layer. The final classification is achieved using Random Forests (RF) classifier which is an ensemble learning approach. According to the experimental results, the suggested model has a classification accuracy of 99 % and a mean squared error of 0.0383. Furthermore, the proposed model has been compared to state-of-the-art algo- rithms and the results showed that the proposed model has the superiority performance. The proposed model can therefore be used to track a variety of cotton areas to enable faster analysis and response, resulting in higher productivity.