Enhanced prediction of agricultural CO₂ emission using ensemble machine learning-based imputation approach

The agricultural sector contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, which cause global warming and climate change. Numerous mathematical models have been developed to predict the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. However, the database utilized for prediction has thousands of missing values and imbalanced data records due to various factors, such as environmental disasters, sensor failure, maintenance issues, and budgetary constraints. Many researchers have either completely discarded records with missing values or have only partially addressed the issue, leading to less precise predictions. This study proposes a machine learning-based ensemble approach that uses multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), and MissForest techniques to impute the missing values by reducing uncertainties and improves robustness in predictions. Furthermore, Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE R) addresses data imbalance in CO2 emissions prediction by generating synthetic data to balance the target variable's distribution in the regression problem. Thereby the proposed SMOTE R and ensemble imputation approach aims to improve prediction accuracy and reliability by tackling data completeness and distribution issues simultaneously. The experiments are conducted on the GRACEnet database shows that the proposed approach outperforms the existing work in measure of R², MAE, and RMSE metrics.