Testing spatial out-of-sample area of influence for grain forecasting models

Abstract We examine the factors that determine if a grain forecasting model fit to one region can be transferred to another region. Prior research has proposed examining the area of applicability (AoA) of a model based on structurally similar characteristics in the Earth Observation predictors and weights based on the model derived feature importance. We expand on and evaluate this approach in the context of grain yield forecasting in Sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, we evaluate an AoA methodology established for generating raster surfaces and apply it to vector supported grain data. We fit a series of ensemble tree models both within single countries and across multiple sets of countries and then test those models in countries excluded from the training set. We then calculate and decompose AoA measures and examine several different performance metrics. We find that the spatial transfer accuracy does not vary across season but does vary by average rainfall and across high, medium, and low yielding regions. In general, areas with higher yields and medium to high average rainfall tend to have higher accuracy for both model training and transfer. Finally, we find that fitting models with multiple countries provides more accurate out-of-sample estimates when compared to models fitted to a single country.