A Strategy of Assessing Climate Factors Influence for Agriculture Output '

Due to the Internet of Things popularity, many agricultural data are collected by sensors automatically. The abundance of agricultural data makes precise prediction of rice yield possible. Because the climate factors have an essential effect on the rice yield, we considered the climate factors in the prediction model. Accordingly, this paper proposes a machine learning model for rice yield prediction in Taiwan, including the genetic algorithm and support vector regression model. The dataset of this study includes the meteorological data from the Central Weather Bureau and rice yield of Taiwan from 2003 to 2019. The experimental results show the performance of the proposed model is nearly 30% better than MARS, RF, ANN, and SVR models. The most important climate factors affecting the rice yield are the total sunshine hours, the number of rainfall days, and the temperature.The proposed model also offers three advantages: (a) the proposed model can be used in different geographical regions with high prediction accuracies; (b) the proposed model has a high explanatory ability because it could select the important climate factors which affect rice yield; (c) the proposed model is more suitable for predicting rice yield because it provides higher reliability and stability for predicting. The proposed model can assist the government in making sustainable agricultural policies.