Predicting soil moisture content of tea plantation using support vector machine optimized by arithmetic optimization algorithm

Abstract

Soil moisture content (SMC) is an important parameter that affects tea growth. Reasonable soil moisture content improves tea quality and ensures tea yield. Therefore, it is necessary to regularly monitor the soil water content. However, the traditional soil moisture content prediction algorithm has the problems of low accuracy and low efficiency. This paper constructs and evaluates the performance of a hybrid arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA) and support vector machine (SVM) prediction model (AOA-SVM) for predicting SMC in tea plantations. Grey relation analysis (GRA) and Pearson correlation analysis are adopted to select features for soil moisture content prediction model, and then the correlation of SMC with soil temperature (ST), atmospheric temperature (AT), and soil electrical conductivity (SEC) was analyzed. The optimal penalty parameter ( c) and the parameter of the kernel function ( g) of SVM model are determined by AOA. The mean square error (MSE) and coefficient of determination ([Formula: see text]), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean error (ME) were calculated to evaluate the performance of the model. Meanwhile, the performance of AOA-SVM model is compared with SVM optimized by the sparrow search algorithm (SSA-SVM), extreme learning machine (ELM), support vector machine (SVM), and convolutional neural networks (CNN). The results showed that AOA-SVM, SSA-SVM and CNN are better, with the coefficient of determination above 93%, the coefficient of determination of SVM and ELM is 81.69% and 89.61%, respectively. The AOA-SVM model has the best R2of 95.03%. This indicates that the AOA-SVM model has significant performance with higher R2, smaller MSE than other models, which has potential implications in precision agriculture.