Title: Agricultural decision system based on advanced machine learning models for yield prediction: Case of East African countries

Abstract

Food security has become a real challenge for some organizations in charge of the food program and for the majority of countries, especially African countries. The United Nations Organizations’ has recently defined the end of hunger and the improvement of food security in 2030 as its primary goal. Improving food security could also pass through the handling of agricultural yield. Agricultural yield is affected by climate changes since this latest decade. Climate change is considered one of the major threats to agricultural development in Africa. Decision-making level and farmers need efficient analytical tools to help them in decision making. Machine learning has become an impressive predictive analytical tool for large volume of data. It has been used in many domains such as medicine, finance, sport, and recently in agriculture. In this work, we propose three crop prediction models : Crop Random Forest, Crop Gradient Boosting Machine and Crop Support Vector Machine. We combine climate data, crop production data, and pesticides data to develop a decision system based on advanced machine learning models. Despite the poor availability of data related to agriculture in Africa, we were able to propose a decision system able to predict the crop yield at the country level in fourteen East African countries. Our experimental results show that the three proposed machine learning models fit well the crop data with a high accuracy R2. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) associated to our models are very minimal because the agricultural prediction values are very close to reality. Our proposed models are reliable and generalize well the agricultural predictions in East Africa.