Artificial intelligence framework for modeling and predicting crop yield to enhance food security in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Predicting crop yields is a critical issue in agricultural production optimization and intensification research. Accurate foresights of natural circumstances a year in advance can have a considerable impact on management decisions regarding crop selection, rotational location in crop rotations, agrotechnical methods employed, and long-term land use planning. One of the most important aspects of precision farming is sustainability. The novelty of this study is to evidence the effective of the temperature, pesticides, and rainfall environment parameters in the influence sustainable agriculture and economic efficiency at the farm level in Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, predicting the future values of main crop yield in Saudi Arabia. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to estimate the impact of environment factors and agrotechnical parameters on agricultural crop yields and to anticipate yields is examined in this study. Using artificial neural networks (ANNs), a highly effective multilayer perceptron (MLP) model was built to accurately predict the crop yield, temperature, insecticides, and rainfall based on environmental data. The dataset is collected from different Saudi Arabia regions from 1994 to 2016, including the temperature, insecticides, rainfall, and crop yields for potatoes, rice, sorghum, and wheat. For this study, we relied on five different statistical evaluation metrics: the mean square error (MSE), the root-mean-square error (RMSE), normalized root mean square error (NRMSE), Pearson’s correlation coefficient (R%), and the determination coefficient (R2). Analyses of datasets for crop yields, temperature, and insecticides led to the development of the MLP models. The datasets are randomly divided into separate samples, 70% for training and 30% for testing. The best-performing MLP model is characterized by values of (R = 100%) and (R2 = 96.33) for predicting insecticides in the testing process. The temperature, insecticides, and rainfall were examined with different crop yields to confirm the effectiveness of these parameters for increasing product crop yields in Saudi Arabia; we found that these items had highest relationships. The average values are R = 98.20%, 96.50, and 99.14% with for the temperature, insecticides, and rainfall, respectively. Based on these findings, it appeared that each of the parameter categories that are considered (temperature, pesticides, and rainfall) had a similar contribution to the accuracy of anticipated yield projection.