Abstract: This technical quest aspired to build deep multifaceted system proficient in forecasting banana harvest yields essential for extensive planning for a sustainable production in the agriculture sector. Recently, deep-learning (DL) approach has been used as a new alternative model in forecasting. In this paper, the enhanced DL approach incorporates multiple long short term memory (LSTM) layers employed with multiple neurons in each layer, fully trained and built a state for forecasting. The enhanced model used the banana harvest yield data from agrarian reform beneficiary (ARB) cooperative of Dapco in Davao del Norte, Philippines. The model parameters such as epoch, batch size and neurons underwent tuning to identify its optimal values to be used in the experiments. Additionally, the root-mean-squared error (RMSE) is used to evaluate the performance of the model. Using the same set of training and testing data, experiment exhibits that the enhanced model achieved the optimal result of 34.805 in terms of RMSE. This means that the enhanced model outperforms the single and multiple LSTM layer with 43.5 percent and 44.95 percent reduction in error rates, respectively. Since there is no proof that LSTM recurrent neutral network has been used with the same agricultural problem domain, therefore, there is no standard available with regards to the level of error reduction in the forecast. Moreover, investigating the performance of the model using diverse datasets specifically with multiple input features (multivariate) is suggested for exploration. Furthermore, extending and embedding this approach to a web-based along with a handy application is the future plan for the benefit of the medium scale banana growers of the region for efficient and effective decision making and advance planning.

Mariannie A Rebortera and Arnel C Fajardo, “An Enhanced Deep Learning Approach in Forecasting Banana Harvest Yields” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), 10(9), 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100935

@article{Rebortera2019,
title = {An Enhanced Deep Learning Approach in Forecasting Banana Harvest Yields},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100935},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100935},
year = {2019},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {10},
number = {9},
author = {Mariannie A Rebortera and Arnel C Fajardo}
}