An Approach for Prediction of Crop Yield Using Machine Learning and Big Data Techniques

Agriculture is the primary source of livelihood which forms the backbone of our country. Current challenges of water shortages, uncontrolled cost due to demand-supply, and weather uncertainty necessitate farmers to be equipped with smart farming. In particular, low yield of crops due to uncertain climatic changes, poor irrigation facilities, reduction in soil fertility and traditional farming techniques need to be addressed. Machine learning is one such technique employed to predict crop yield in agriculture. Various machine learning techniques such as prediction, classification, regression and clustering are utilized to forecast crop yield. Artificial neural networks, support vector machines, linear and logistic regression, decision trees, Naïve Bayes are some of the algorithms used to implement prediction. However, the selection of the appropriate algorithm from the pool of available algorithms imposes challenge to the researcher with respect to the chosen crop. In this paper, an investigation has been performed on how various machine learning algorithms are useful in prediction of crop yield. An approach has been proposed for prediction of crop yield using machine learning techniques in big data computing paradigm