Reinforced XGBoost machine learning model for sustainable intelligent agrarian applications

Abstract

The development in science and technical intelligence has incited to represent an extensive amount ofdata from various fields of agriculture. Therefore an objective rises up for the examination of the available data and integrating with processes like crop enhancement, yield prediction, examination of plant infections etc. Machine learning has up surged with tremendous processing techniques to perceive new contingencies in the multi-disciplinary agrarian advancements. In this pa- per a novel hybrid regression algorithm, reinforced extreme gradient boosting is proposed which displays essentially improved execution over traditional machine learning algorithms like artificial neural networks, deep Q-Network, gradient boosting, ran- dom forest and decision tree. Extreme gradient boosting constructs new models, which are essentially, decision trees learning from the mistakes of their predecessors by optimizing the gradient descent loss function. The proposed hybrid model performs reinforcement learning at every node during the node splitting process of the decision tree construction. This leads to effective utilizationofthesamplesbyselectingtheappropriatesplitattributeforenhancedperformance. Model’sperformanceisevaluated by means of Mean Square Error, Root Mean Square Error, Mean Absolute Error, and Coefficient of Determination. To assure a fair assessment of the results, the model assessment is performed on both training and test dataset. The regression diagnostic plots from residuals and the results obtained evidently delineates the fact that proposed hybrid approach performs better with reduced error measure and improved accuracy of 94.15% over the other machine learning algorithms. Also the performance of probability density function for the proposed model delineates that, it can preserve the actual distributional characteristics of the original crop yield data more approximately when compared to the other experimented machine learning models.