Harnessing the power of machine learning for crop improvement and sustainable production

Abstract

Crop improvement and production domains encounter large amounts of expanding data with multi-layer complexity that forces researchers to use machine-learning approaches to establish predictive and informative models to understand the sophisticated mechanisms underlying these processes. All machine-learning approaches aim to fit models to target data; nevertheless, it should be noted that a wide range of specialized methods might initially appear confusing. The principal objective of this study is to offer researchers an explicit introduction to some of the essential machine-learning approaches and their applications, comprising the most modern and utilized methods that have gained widespread adoption in crop improvement or similar domains. This article explicitly explains how different machine-learning methods could be applied for given agricultural data, highlights newly emerging techniques for machine-learning users, and lays out technical strategies for agri/crop research practitioners and researchers.