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