Winter Wheat Yield Prediction Using Convolutional Neural Networks from Environmental and Phenological Data

Crop yield forecasting depends on many interactive factors including crop genotype, weather, soil, and management practices. This study analyzes the performance of machine learning and deep learning methods for winter wheat yield prediction using extensive datasets of weather, soil, and crop phenology. We propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) which uses the 1-dimentional convolution operation to capture the time dependencies of environmental variables. The proposed CNN, evaluated along with other machine learning models for winter wheat yield prediction in Germany, outperformed all other models tested. To address the seasonality, weekly features were used that explicitly take soil moisture and meteorological events into account. Our results indicated that nonlinear models such as deep learning models and XGboost are more effective in finding the functional relationship between the crop yield and input data compared to linear models and deep neural networks had a higher prediction accuracy than XGboost. One of the main limitations of machine learning models is their black box property. Therefore, we moved beyond prediction and performed feature selection, as it provides key results towards explaining yield prediction (variable importance by time). As such, our study indicates which variables have the most significant effect on winter wheat yield.