Evaluating and improving crop-yield forecasting methods during extreme drought

2026-08-18

AI Summary

研究通过比较机器学习和深度学习模型预测极端干旱年份玉米产量，采用样本加权和特征选择改进方法以应对训练与测试数据分布差异问题。

Abstract

The impact of climate variability on food production has led to the creation of various forecasting models that uses machine learning (ML), numerical weather predictors (NWP) or a hybrid of ML-NWP models to identify structural and physical relationships between meteorological drivers and crop growth, in order to predict crop yield. Droughts, for example the 2012 Midwestern US (Corn Belt) drought, are extreme events that affect crop production and test the limits of these forecasting models. Using 16 meteorological drivers as predictors, we compare ML (non-deep learning) and deep learning forecasting models to predict the county-level corn yield for the extreme drought year, 2012. This forecasting problem is characterized by a dissimilarity between the feature distributions of the training and test data, where the meteorological conditions of the extreme drought year fall outside the range of historically observed values. Additionally, the dataset consists of spatial and temporal irregularities where counties with missing yields introduce spatial sparsity and the use of only a subset of daily values per year introduce temporal sparsity. To overcome this, we use sample weighting and feature selection as modifications to improve our forecasting models. These modifications lead to an improvement for ML models; however, the deep learning model VITA shows little to no improvement. While VITA outperforms the ML models with or without modifications, our current study sheds light on the effect of dissimilarity between train and test feature distributions on forecasting models, compares deep learning versus non-deep learning models, and introduces modifications that are effective for non-deep learning models.

Problem

• extreme drought
• crop yield forecasting
• feature distribution dissimilarity
• spatial sparsity
• temporal sparsity

Innovation

• sample weighting
• feature selection
• distribution dissimilarity
• spatial and temporal sparsity
• crop-yield forecasting