A Framework for Predicting Winter Wheat Yield in Northern China with Triple Cross-Attention and Multi-Source Data Fusion

To solve the issue that existing yield prediction methods do not fully capture the interaction between multiple factors, we propose a winter wheat yield prediction framework with triple cross-attention for multi-source data fusion. This framework consists of three modules: a multi-source data processing module, a multi-source feature fusion module, and a yield prediction module. The multi-source data processing module collects satellite, climate, and soil data based on the winter wheat planting range, and constructs a multi-source feature sequence set by combining statistical data. The multi-source feature fusion module first extracts deeper-level feature information based on the characteristics of different data, and then performs multi-source feature fusion through a triple cross-attention fusion mechanism. The encoder part in the production prediction module adds a graph attention mechanism, forming a dual branch with the original multi-head self-attention mechanism to ensure the capture of global dependencies while enhancing the preservation of local feature information. The decoder section generates the final predicted output. The results show that: (1) Using 2021 and 2022 as test sets, the mean absolute error of our method is 385.99 kg/hm², and the root mean squared error is 501.94 kg/hm², which is lower than other methods. (2) It can be concluded that the jointing-heading stage (March to April) is the most crucial period affecting winter wheat production. (3) It is evident that our model has the ability to predict the final winter wheat yield nearly a month in advance.