Improving the Transferability of Deep Learning Models for Crop Yield Prediction: A Partial Domain Adaptation Approach

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been extensive exploration of machine learning (ML), especially deep learning (DL), for crop yield prediction, resulting in impressive levels of accuracy. However, such models are highly dependent on training samples with ground truth labels (i.e., crop yield records), which are not available in some regions. Additionally, due to the existence of domain shifts between different spatial regions, DL models trained within one region (i.e., source domain) tend to have poor performance when directly applied to other regions (i.e., target domain). Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has become a promising strategy to improve the transferability of DL models by aligning the feature distributions in the source domain and the target domain. Despite the success, existing UDA models generally assume an identical label space across different domains. This assumption can be invalid in crop yield prediction scenarios, as crop yields can vary significantly in heterogeneous regions. Due to the mismatch between label spaces, negative transfer may occur if the entire source and target domains are forced to align. To address this issue, we proposed a novel partial domain adversarial neural network (PDANN), which relaxes the assumption of fully, equally shared label spaces across domains by downweighing the outlier source samples. Specifically, during model training, the PDANN weighs each labeled source sample based on the likelihood of its yield value given the expected target yield distribution. Instead of aligning the target domain to the entire source domain, the PDANN model downweighs the outlier source samples and performs partial weighted alignment of the target domain to the source domain. As a result, the negative transfer caused by source samples in the outlier label space would be alleviated. In this study, we assessed the model’s performance on predicting yields for two main commodities in the U.S., including corn and soybean, using the U.S. corn belt as the study region. The counties under study were divided into two distinct ecological zones and alternatively used as the source and target domains. Feature variables, including time-series vegetation indices (VIs) and sequential meteorological variables, were collected and aggregated at the county level. Next, the PDANN model was trained with the extracted features and corresponding crop yield records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Finally, the trained model was evaluated for three testing years from 2019 to 2021. The experimental results showed that the developed PDANN model had achieved a mean coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.70 and 0.67, respectively, in predicting corn and soybean yields, outperforming three other ML and UDA models by a large margin from 6% to 46%. As the first study performing partial domain adaptation for crop yield prediction, this research demonstrates a novel solution for addressing negative transfer and improving DL models’ transferability on crop yield prediction.