Evaluating Autoencoders as a Dimensionality Reduction Mechanism to Support Clustering Brazilian Agricultural Diversity

Abstract

Brazilian agricultural production presents high spatial diversity, challenging the conception of public policies. This article proposes an approach for grouping Brazilian municipalities according to their agricultural production. We combine a feature extraction using autoencoders and clustering based on k-means and Self-Organizing Maps. We used panel data from IBGE’s annual estimates of the production value of permanent and temporary crops, animal products, aquaculture, plant extractivism, forestry, planted areas, and herd population between 1999 and 2018. We analyzed different structures of simple stacked and incomplete autoencoders, varying the number of layers and neurons in each, and evaluated the asymmetric exponential linear loss function to handle the sparse data. We applied the Isomap, Kernel PCA, Truncated SVD, and MDS dimensionality reduction methods for comparative purposes. Results showed that the autoencoders could extract characteristics from the transformed raw data to allow the clustering of municipalities to reveal regional and evenintra-regional patterns. The autoencoders improved comparative performance as the intrinsic dimensionality increased.