eXplainable expert systems for potato tuber yield prediction in the Maritime provinces of Canada
Article
Article Title | eXplainable expert systems for potato tuber yield prediction in the Maritime provinces of Canada |
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ERA Journal ID | 41630 |
Article Category | Article |
Authors | Jamei, Mehdi, Farooque, Aitazaz Ahsan, Ali, Mumtaz, Karbasi, Masoud, Afzaal, Hassan, Cheema, Saad Javed, Zaman, Qamar Uz, Woon, Kok Sin and Sheridan, Paul |
Journal Title | Computers and Electronics in Agriculture |
Journal Citation | 238 |
Article Number | 110831 |
Number of Pages | 24 |
Year | 2025 |
Publisher | Elsevier |
Place of Publication | Netherlands |
ISSN | 0168-1699 |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2025.110831 |
Web Address (URL) | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168169925009378 |
Abstract | The potato crop is vital to the economy of Canada’s Maritime provinces. Prince Edward Island (PEI) and New Brunswick (NB) contribute significantly to Canadian potato production and gross domestic product (GDP). Estimating potato tuber yields helps farmers to make informed decisions for sustainable and profitable farming. This study investigated fluctuations in tuber yield based on 30 soil properties gathered over four seasons through experimental trials. An emerging eXplainable high-dimensional feature vote-based ensemble framework explained with SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) tool was employed to estimate potato tuber yield accurately. In order to develop the model, the most influential feature was first filtered using the Boruta-SHAP feature selection. Afterwards, the most deserved combinations (four scenarios) were ascertained using the best subset regression (BSR) integrated with two Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM), namely Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) and Multi-Objective Optimization methods were adopted based on the Ratio Analysis (MOORA). To estimate potato tuber yield, we adopted a novel explainable ensemble machine learning model, called VOTE-LGCB, that combines voted Categorical Boosting and the Light Gradient-Boosting Machine framework. We evaluated our approach against Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression, elastic net regression, Extra Tree, classical LightGBM, and classical CatBoost baselines. Six metric performances such as correlation coefficient (R), root mean square error (RMSE), and reliability were implemented to validate the multi-process ML models. All the metrics were singularized using WASPAS and MOORA to determine the best input combination related to each model separately. We found that the VOTE-LGCB-Combo 3 outperformed baseline methods (R = 0.8958, RMSE = 5088.5087, Reliability = 93.7500, WASPAS = 0.00023, and MOORA = 0.3788). Moisture content was identified as the most significant feature, followed by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The modeling framework we advance can be used as a reliable simulation system for various aspects of agricultural production systems that involve high-dimensional features. |
Keywords | Potato tuber yield; Explainable machine learning; MOORA; LightGBM; Boruta-SHAP; CatBoost |
Contains Sensitive Content | Does not contain sensitive content |
ANZSRC Field of Research 2020 | 461103. Deep learning |
460207. Modelling and simulation | |
Byline Affiliations | University of Prince Edward Island, Canada |
Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Iran | |
UniSQ College | |
Dalhousie University, Canada | |
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China |
https://research.usq.edu.au/item/zz19x/explainable-expert-systems-for-potato-tuber-yield-prediction-in-the-maritime-provinces-of-canada
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eXplainable expert systems for potato tuber yield prediction in the Maritime provinces of Canada.pdf | ||
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | ||
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