A Stacking Ensemble Framework Leveraging Synthetic Data for Accurate and Stable Crop Yield Forecasting

With the rapid increase in world’s population and changing climate patterns, accurate crop yield forecasting is essential to ensure food security and sustainable agriculture. This study presents a yield prediction framework consisting of Stacking Ensemble Model (SEM) and its Optimized variant (OSEM), which integrates real-world agricultural data with synthetic data generated using the Prophet time-series model. The ensemble comprises Random Forest, XGBoost, Decision Tree, and K-Nearest Neighbors as base learners, with an Extra Trees Regressor as the meta-learner. OSEM incorporates hyperparameter tuning and dimensionality reduction using Singular Value Decomposition to enhance predictive performance and reduce feature noise. Extensive experiments on globally distributed and region-specific crop datasets demonstrate that OSEM consistently outperforms both SEM and state-of-the-art baselines, achieving <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">R</i><sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> = 0.996 and MAE = 0.185 t/ha. Stability and convergence analysis, supported by Wilcoxon and Friedman tests, further confirm the robustness and reliability of the proposed model for scalable crop yield forecasting.