Development of a prototype system for a rice yield prediction using deep learning
摘要
Accurate crop yield prediction is essential for ensuring food security and serves as a critical reference for managing the supply and demand of agricultural products, stabilizing market prices, and safeguarding farm incomes. To enable early yield forecasting, we developed a rice yield prediction system by integrating remote sensing time-series data, grain number observations, simulated yields from a crop growth model, and statistical yield data. We employed a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model, a deep learning architecture optimized for sequential data, to predict rice yields. The dataset was split into training and validation sets at a 9:1 ratio. The GRU model was configured with a structure including five GRU hidden layers followed by two fully connected layers and was trained using the Adamax optimizer for enhanced accuracy. Model training was conducted with 1000 epochs, a learning rate of 0.005, and a batch size of 20. A total of 28 input variables were used, including simulated yields, grain number, and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time-series data from day of year (DOY) 105–233, derived from MYD13Q1 and MYD09Q1 products. Yield predictions were performed at the provincial level and aggregated to derive national-scale estimates. Evaluation results for the 2024 growing season demonstrated high predictive performance, with the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) ranging from 1.5 to 3.4 kg 10a⁻¹ and the Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) ranging from 0.29 to 0.67%. While further validation is warranted, the proposed GRU-based yield prediction system demonstrates strong potential as a reliable tool for early yield forecasting and improved food security.