Physics-Aware Ensemble Learning for Superior Crop Recommendation in Smart Agriculture

Agriculture remains the backbone of many countries; it plays a pivotal role in shaping a country's overall economy. Accurate prediction in agriculture practices, particularly crop recommendations, can greatly enhance productivity and resource management. IoT and AI technologies have great potential for enhancing precision farming; traditional machine learning (ML) and ensemble learning (EL) models rely primarily on the training data for predictions. When the training data is noisy or limited, these models can result in inaccurate or unrealistic predictions. These limitations are addressed by incorporating physical laws into the ML framework, thereby ensuring that the predictions remain physically plausible. In this study, we conducted a detailed analysis of ML and EL models, both with and without optimization, and compared their performance against a physics-informed ML model. In the proposed stacking physics-informed ML model, the optimal temperature and the pH for each crop (physics law) are provided as input during the training process in addition to the training data. The physics-informed model was trained to simultaneously satisfy two objectives: (1) fitting the data, and (2) adhering to the physics law. This was achieved by including a penalty term within its total loss function, forcing the model to make predictions that are both accurate and physically feasible. Our findings indicate that the proposed novel stacking physics-informed model achieved a highest accuracy of 99.50% when compared to ML and EL models with optimization.