Prediction of Land Suitability for Crop Cultivation Using Classification Techniques

Abstract Agriculture, the backbone of every country, has been an emerging field of research, particularly in the recent past. The soil type and environment are critical factors that drive agriculture, especially in terms of crop prediction. To determine which crops grow best in certain types of soil and environment, the characteristics of the latter are to be ascertained. In the past, farmers picked suitable crops for cultivation, based on first-hand experience. Today, however, identifying appropriate crops for particular areas has become a difficult proposition. The application of machine learning techniques to agriculture is an emerging field of research that helps predicts crops for easy cultivation and improved productivity. In this work, a comparative analysis is undertaken using several classifiers like the k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forests (RF) and Bagging to help suggest the most suitable cultivable crop(s), based on soil and environmental characteristics, for a specific piece of land. The algorithms are trained with the training data and subsequently tested with the soil and climate-based test dataset. The results of all the approaches are evaluated to identify the best classification techniques. Experimental results show that the bagging method outclasses others with respect to all performance metrics.

Dynamic Model for Assisted Reproductive Technology Outcome Prediction

Abstract Infertility is becoming a growing issue in almost all countries. Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) are recent development in treating infertility that give hope to the infertile couples. However, the pregnancy rates achieved with the aid of ART is considerably low, as success in ART is not only based on the treatment but also on many other controllable and uncontrollable biological, social, and environmental features. High expenditures and painful process of ART cycles are the two major barriers for opting for ART. Moreover, ART treatments are not covered by any health insurance schemes. Computational prediction models could be used to improve the success rate by predicting the treatment outcome, before the start of an ART cycle. This may suggest the couples and the doctors to decide on the next course of action i.e. either to opt for ART or opt for correcting determinants or quit the ART. With the intension to improve the success rate of ART by providing decision support system to the physicians as well to the patients before entering into the treatment this research work proposes a dynamic model for ART outcome prediction using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. The proposed dynamic model is partially implemented with the help of an ensemble of heterogeneous incremental classifier and its performance is compared with state-of-art classifiers such as Naïve Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), K-star etc.,using ART dataset. Performance of the model is evaluated with various metrics such as accuracy, Precision Recall Curve (PRC), Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC), F-Measure etc., However, ROC cure area is taken as the chief metric. Evaluation results shows that the model achieves the performance with the ROC area value of 94.1 %.