Can Machine Learning classifiers be used to regulate nutrients using small training datasets for aquaponic irrigation?: A comparative analysis

PLoS One. 2022 Aug 16;17(8):e0269401. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0269401. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

With the recent advances in the field of alternate agriculture, there has been an ever-growing demand for aquaponics as a potential substitute for traditional agricultural techniques for improving sustainable food production. However, the lack of data-driven methods and approaches for aquaponic cultivation remains a challenge. The objective of this research is to investigate statistical methods to make inferences using small datasets for nutrient control in aquaponics to optimize yield. In this work, we employed the Density-Based Synthetic Minority Over-sampling TEchnique (DB-SMOTE) to address dataset imbalance, and ExtraTreesClassifer and Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) to choose the relevant features. Synthetic data generation techniques such as the Monte-Carlo (MC) sampling techniques were used to generate enough data points and different feature engineering techniques were used on the predictors before evaluating the performance of kernel-based classifiers with the goal of controlling nutrients in the aquaponic solution for optimal growth.[27-35].

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Agriculture
  • Machine Learning*
  • Nutrients*

Grants and funding

The research was supported by the Departmental research grants of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station allotted to Stavros Kalafatis who is a Professor of Practice and the Associate Department Head.