Weather based crop yield prediction using artificial neural networks : A comparative study with other approaches

This paper attempts to compare the weather indices based regression approach and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach for rice yield prediction at district level of West Bengal. The weather indices for weather variables, viz., minimum temperature, maximum temperature, rainfall, and relative humidity are used as input variables along with time variable t and yield of rice as output variable. The study reveals that the ANN approach works better than the standard regression approach in crop yield prediction. The prediction error percentages are found to be consistently less than 5% in MLP ANN approach except for one district.