A Hybrid CFS Filter and RF-RFE Wrapper-Based Feature Extraction for Enhanced Agricultural Crop Yield Prediction Modeling

The innovation in science and technical knowledge has prompted an enormous amount of information for the agrarian sector. Machine learning has risen with massive processing techniques to perceive new contingencies in agricultural development. Machine learning is a novel onset for the investigation and determination of unpredictable agrarian issues. Machine learning models actualize the need for scaling the learning model’s performance. Feature selection can impact a machine learning model’s performance by defining a significant feature subset for increasing the performance and identifying the variability. This paper explains a novel hybrid feature extraction procedure, which is an aggregation of the correlation-based filter (CFS) and random forest recursive feature elimination (RFRFE) wrapper framework. The proposed feature extraction approach aims to identify an optimal subclass of features from a collection of climate, soil, and groundwater characteristics for constructing a crop-yield forecasting machine learning model with better performance and accuracy. The model’s precision and effectiveness are estimated (i) with all the features in the dataset, (ii) with essential features obtained using the learning algorithm’s inbuilt ‘feature_importances’ method, and (iii) with the significant features obtained through the proposed hybrid feature extraction technique. The validation of the hybrid CFS and RFRFE feature extraction approach in terms of evaluation metrics, predictive accuracies, and diagnostic plot performance analysis in comparison with random forest, decision tree, and gradient boosting machine learning algorithms are found to be profoundly satisfying.