Comparative evaluation of linear and nonlinear weather-based models for coconut yield prediction in the west coast of Indi

Abstract

Coconut is a major plantation crop of coastal India. Accurate prediction of its yield is helpful for the farmers, industries and policymakers. Weather has profound impact on coconut fruit setting, and therefore, it greatly affects the yield. Annual coconut yieldandmonthlyweatherdatafor2000–2015werecompiledforfourteendistrictsofthewestcoastofIndia.Weatherindiceswere generatedusingmonthlycumulativevalueforrainfallandmonthlyaveragevalueforotherparameterslikemaximumandminimum temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and solar radiation. Different linear models like stepwise multiple linear regression (SMLR), principal component analysis together with SMLR (PCA-SMLR), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and elastic net (ELNET) with nonlinear models namely artificial neural network (ANN) and PCA-ANN were employed to model the coconut yield using the monthly weather indices as inputs. The model’s performance was evaluated using R2, root mean square error (RMSE) and absolute percentage error (APE). The R2 and RMSE of the models ranged between 0.45–0.99 and 18–3624 nuts ha−1 respectively during calibration while during validation the APE varied between 0.12 and 58.21. The overall average ranking of the models based the se performance statistics were in the order of ELNET >LASSO >ANN >SMLR> PCASMLR > PCA-ANN. Results indicated that the ELNET model could be used for prediction of coconut yield for the region