Abstract
Recently, statistical machine learning and deep learning methods have
been widely explored for corn yield prediction. Though successful,
machine learning models generated within a specific spatial domain often
lose their validity when directly applied to new regions. To address
this issue, we designed an unsupervised adaptive domain adversarial
neural network (ADANN). Specifically, through domain adversarial
training, the ADANN model reduced the impact of domain shift by
projecting data from different domains into the same subspace. Also, the
ADANN model was designed to be trained in an adaptive way, which
guaranteed the model can learn the domain-invariant features and perform
accurate yield prediction simultaneously. Informative variables
including time-series vegetation indices and sequential weather
observations were first collected from multiple data sources and
aggregated to the county level. Then, we trained the ADANN model with
the extracted features and corresponding reported county-level corn
yield from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Finally, the
trained model was evaluated in four testing years 2016-2019. The U.S.
corn belt was used as the study area and counties under study were
grouped into two diverse ecological regions. The experimental results
showed that the developed ADANN model had better performance than three
other state-of-the-art machine learning models in both local experiments
(train and test in the same region) and transfer experiments (train and
test in different regions). As the first study using adversarial
learning for crop yield prediction, this research demonstrates a novel
solution for improving model transferability on crop yield prediction.