Evaluation of multiple linear, neural network and penalised regression models for prediction of rice yield based on weather parameters for west coast of India

Rice is generally grown under completely flooded condition and providing food for more than half of the world's population. Any changes in weather parameters might affect the rice productivity thereby impacting the food security of burgeoning population. So, the crop yield forecasting based on weather parameters will help farmers, policy makers and administrators to manage adversities. The present investigation examines the application of stepwise multiple linear regression (SMLR), artificial neural network (ANN) solely and in combination with principal components analysis (PCA) and penalised regression models (e.g. least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) or elastic net (ENET)) for rice yield prediction using long-term weather data. The R² and root mean square error (RMSE) of the models varied between 0.22-0.98 and 24.02-607.29 kg ha^-1, respectively during calibration. During validation with independent dataset, the RMSE and normalised root mean square error (nRMSE) ranged between 21.35-981.89 kg ha^-1 and 0.98-36.7%, respectively. For evaluation of multiple models for multiple locations statistically, overall average ranks on the basis of R² and RMSE of calibration; RMSE and nRMSE of validation were calculated and non-parametric Friedman test was applied to check the significant difference among the models. The ranking of the models revealed that LASSO (2.63) was the best performing model followed by ENET (3.07) while PCA-ANN (4.19) was the worst model which was found significant at p < 0.001. The reason behind good performance of LASSO and ENET is that these models prevent overfitting and reduce model complexity by penalising the magnitude of coefficients. Then, pairwise multiple comparison test was performed which indicated LASSO as the best model which was found similar to SMLR and ENET. So, for prediction of rice yield, these models can very well be utilised for west coast of India.