arXiv Machine Learning

Can Machine Learning Forecast Rice Yields in Data-Constrained Settings? Satellite Climate Data, National Crop Statistics, and Lessons from Sierra Leone

arXiv:2606. 13959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sierra Leone's agriculture operates with almost no data-driven decision support, and no published machine learning study has examined the country's crop yields.

arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

An Input-Frugal Deep Learning Framework for Weather-Driven National Crop-Yield Forecasting: A Case Study of Brazilian Soybean

The paper introduces a lightweight deep learning framework that forecasts Brazilian soybean yields using only routine weather data and two simple static inputs (crop year and agro-environmental label). Across 20 seasons, transformer-based models achieved the highest accuracy, outperforming traditional ridge regression and a moving‑average baseline by nearly 48%. Ablation studies show that the static inputs and spatial expansion improve performance without adding complexity, and SHAP analysis highlights the importance of crop year and weather variables in driving yield variations.

By Fernando Dupin da Cunha Mello (Stricto Sensu Department, SENAI CIMATEC University, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil), Prashant Kumar (Global Centre for Clean Air Research), Erick G. Sperandio Nascimento (Stricto Sensu Department, SENAI CIMATEC University, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Improving global precipitation forecasts with an AI weather model trained on satellite observations

The paper presents Laxmi, a retrained version of the AIFS weather model that uses satellite-based precipitation observations instead of ERA5 reanalysis data. Laxmi achieves a 19% improvement in global probabilistic accuracy, reduces drizzle overprediction by 33%, and boosts the 95th percentile Brier skill score by 57%. In a case study of 10 Indian tropical storms, Laxmi accurately forecasted 150 mm event-total precipitation in 7 events, outperforming both the original AIFS and the leading physical model IFS.

By Julian F. Schmitt, Bertrand Delorme, Robert C. King, Yashica Patodia, Tapio Schneider, Aditi Sheshadri, Ravi Jain
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Evaluating and improving crop-yield forecasting methods during extreme drought

The study evaluates crop‑yield forecasting methods for the 2012 Midwestern US drought, comparing non‑deep learning machine learning models with a deep learning model (VITA) using 16 meteorological predictors. It highlights challenges such as distributional dissimilarity between training and test data, spatial and temporal sparsity, and demonstrates that sample weighting and feature selection improve non‑deep learning models but not VITA. The work contrasts deep versus non‑deep learning approaches and shows how modifications can mitigate issues arising from extreme drought conditions.

By Shrey Gupta, Yi Ming, George Mohler
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Accurate prediction is not profitable advice: profit-based evaluation of machine learning nitrogen recommendations in winter wheat

The study evaluates machine learning models for nitrogen recommendations in winter wheat by directly scoring profit loss on 892 yield response curves, rather than relying on prediction accuracy. Results show that none of the models recover the best rate within farm tolerance, and at typical prices all models underperform standard UK advice. A simple post‑model correction step reduces profit losses by up to 43% without retraining, while a hybrid approach further mitigates bias and large losses.

By Xulong Wang, Po Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Profit based evaluation of machine learning for nitrogen recommendations in winter wheat

The study evaluates machine learning for nitrogen recommendations in winter wheat by directly scoring profit loss on 892 yield response curves, rather than relying on prediction accuracy. Results show that ML models alone fail to recover the best nitrogen rate within farm tolerance and underperform standard UK advice across price scenarios. However, a simple post‑model correction step significantly reduces profit losses, and a hybrid approach combining standard advice with a damped correction eliminates bias and large losses.

By Xulong Wang, Po Yang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Profit based evaluation of machine learning for nitrogen recommendations in winter wheat

The paper evaluates machine learning for nitrogen recommendations in winter wheat by directly scoring the profit lost on measured yield response curves, rather than relying on prediction accuracy. Using 892 yield curves from UK experiments, the authors find that machine learning models fail to recover the best nitrogen rate within farm tolerance and generally underperform standard UK advice in terms of profit. However, a simple post‑model correction step can reduce profit losses by up to 43% without retraining, suggesting that machine learning can enhance standard advice rather than replace it.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AgroBench: A Reproducible Multimodal Benchmark for Weakly Supervised Crop Yield Learning from County Statistics and Pixel Observations

AgroBench is a reproducible benchmark that converts U.S. county-level crop yield statistics into weakly supervised pixel‑level crop time series. The data generation pipeline fuses USDA yield data with land cover masks, Sentinel‑2 and Sentinel‑1 imagery, climatic variables, and terrain information to produce multimodal sequences for individual crop pixels across the growing season. The benchmark includes over 13 million observations from 788,654 crop pixels, covering 5,107 county‑year combinations for five major U.S. crops from 2017 to 2024, and establishes a Leave‑One‑Year‑Out evaluation protocol with baseline machine learning results.

By Udaiveer Singh, Rajiv Ranjan, Shashank Tamaskar, Dharmendra Saraswat
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

When Prices Double in a Week: Forecasting of Agricultural Volatility in Import-Isolated Markets

arXiv:2606. 29248v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vegetable prices in Sri Lanka are highly volatile because the market is largely import-isolated, so supply disruptions quickly drive prices up.

By Ranuga Weerasekara, Heshan Nethmina, Manuja Ranathunga, Vinma Wettasinghe, Dinithi Navodya, Subavarshana Arumugam, Nirasha Munasinghe, Nisansa de Silva, Sandareka Wickramanayake