YieldVision: Model-Driven Decision Support System for Crop Yield Prediction

Abstract

Agriculture, a cornerstone of global food security, faces unprecedented challenges in achieving sustainable productivity. Crop yield prediction, a crucial aspect of agricultural planning, suffers from inefficiencies rooted in technological and methodological gaps. While traditional approaches rely on historical data and empirical estimations, they often fail to address the complexity of environmental interactions because they lack real-time data integration and limited access to accurate data, leading to inaccuracies and resource mismanagement. Addressing these issues requires the development of advanced Machine Learning (ML) models-based system that can predict crop yield with high accuracy in dynamic environments. This paper presents YieldVision, a decision support system driven by advanced ML models for Crop Yield Prediction based on environmental, soil, and crop-specific factors. In this work, we proposed three crop prediction models: Random Forest (RF), Long Short Time Memory (LSTM) and Hybrid (RF LSTM). RF regressor effectively captured the complex, nonlinear relationships among soil nutrients, fertilizer application, and temperature. The LSTM network learned the way short-term weather fluctuations impact crop development over time, and the hybrid model combined LSTM for environmental-related factors, and RF for soil-related factors. Experimental results on the Crop Yield Prediction Dataset containing soil and weather parameters showed that RF has the highest accuracy 𝑅2 = 99.10% and outperforms both LSTM and hybrid which have 87.50% and 97.30% accuracy respectively, confirming its suitability for the dataset. RF has the lowest RMSE and MAE compared to LSTM and hybrid models. The models are integrated into a decision support system that is deployed to operationalize the models in real-world settings with user interfaces accessible via mobile or web-delivered real-time alerts and yield forecasts to farmers and agronomists.