Plant yield prediction in indoor farming using machine learning

Abstract: Agricultural industry has started to rely more on data driven approaches to improve productivity and utilize their resources effectively. This thesis project was carried out in collaboration with Ljusgårda AB, it explores plant yield prediction using machine learning models and hyperparameter tweaking. This thesis work is based on data gathered from the company and the plant yield prediction is carried out on two scenarios whereby each scenario is focused on a different time frame of the growth stage. The first scenario predicts yield from day 8 to day 22 of DAT (Day After Transplant), while the second scenario predicts yield from day 1 to day 22 of DAT and three machine learning algorithms Support Vector Regression (SVR), Long Short Time Memory (LSTM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) were investigated. Machine learning model’s performances were evaluated using the metrics; Mean Square Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and r-squared. The evaluation results showed that ANN performed best on MSE and r-squared with dataset 1, while SVR performed best on MAE with dataset 2. Thus, both ANN and SVR meets the objective of this thesis work. The hyperparameter tweaking experiment of the three models further demonstrated the significance of hyperparameter tuning in improving the models and making them more suitable to the available data.