Abstract

Deep learning techniques have been used effectively for rubber crop yield prediction. A hybrid of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is the best technique for crop yield prediction because it can effectively handle uncertainty of features. Hence, in this paper, a hybrid CNN-RNN method is proposed to forecast Hevea yields based on environmental data in Kerala state, India. The proposed hybrid CNN-RNN method reduces the internal covariate shift of CNN by batch normalization and solves the gradient vanishing or exploding problem of RNN using LSTM with a cell activation mechanism. The proposed method has three essential characteristics: (i) it captures the time dependency of environmental factors and improves the inherent computational time; (ii) it is capable of generalizing the yield prediction under uncertain conditions without loss of prediction accuracy; (iii) combined with the back propagation and feed forward method it can reveal the extent to which samples of weather conditions and soil data conditions are suitable to provide a clear boundary between rubber yield variations.