Machine Learning-based Extrapolation of Crop Cultivation Cost

Abstract

It is important to comprehend the relation between operational expenses such as labour, seed, irrigation, insecticides, fertilizers and manure costs necessary for the cultivation of crops. A precise cost for the cultivation of crops can offer vital information for agricultural decision-making. The main goal of the study is to compare machine learning (ML) techniques to measure relationships among operational cost characteristics for predicting crop cultivation costs before the start of the growing season using the dataset made available by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare of the Government of India. This paper describes various ML regression techniques, compares various learning algorithms as well as determines the most efficient regression algorithms based on the data set, the number of samples and attributes. The data set used for predicting the cost with 1680 instances includes varying costs for 14 different crops for 12 years (2010-2011 to 2021-2022). Ten different ML algorithms are considered and the crop cultivation cost is predicted. The evaluation results show that Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Extended gradient boosting (XR) and K-Neighbours (KN) regression provide better performance in terms of coefficient of determination (R2), root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) rate while training and testing time. This study also compares different ML techniques and showed significant differences using the statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA) test. The optimal hyperparameters for the ML models are found using the gridsearchCV and randomizedsearchCV functions, which improves the model's capacity for generalisation.