A Deep Neural Network Approach to Prediction of Rice Yields in China

Global warming due to the increase of greenhouse gases may significantly affect various aspects of the Earth’s environment and human life. In particular, the impacts of climate change on agriculture would be severe, leading to damages to crop yields. This paper examines the experimental prediction of rice yield in China using DNN (deep neural network) and climate model data for the period between 1979 and 2009. The DNN model built through the process of hyperparameter optimization can mitigate an overfitting problem and cope with outlier cases. Our model showed approximately 38.7% improved accuracy than the MLR (multiple linear regression) model, in terms of correlation coefficient with the yield statistics. We found that the diurnal temperature range and potential evapotranspiration were the critical factors for rice yield prediction. Our DNN model was also robust to extreme conditions such as drought in 2006 and 2007 in China, which showed its applicability to the future simulation of crop yields under climate change.

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