Classification of Potato Varieties Drought Stress Tolerance Using Supervised Learning

Featured Application For breeders of new potato cultivars to assess their drought stress tolerance. The presented study was aimed at investigating the variability for drought tolerance among potato cultivars. To achieve this, the stability of drought tolerance of potato cultivars under different water regime conditions was inspected during 11 years of consecutive experiments. The data on 50 potato cultivars' responses to drought stress, based on the morphological features of plants, i.e., leaf and stem mass and size of the assimilation area, have been collected. The tuber yield, as well as calculated plant tolerance indexes and Climatic Water Balance for each growing season, were analyzed. The studied cultivars were later assigned into one of three tolerance groups for soil drought. The highest linear relationship was found between the mass of leaves and stems and the tuber yield but was found too weak to raise any conclusions. Thus, the ensemble learning models have been evaluated and returned better performance results, and the final classifier is the implementation of extreme gradient boosting. The final classifier of the 96.7% accuracy, which used several measured potato parameters (Relative yield decrease, Stem mass, Maturity, Assimilation area, Leaves mass, Yield per plant, calculated Climatic water balance, and indices: MSTI and DSI) that could distinguish the different tolerance groups were evaluated in the study.

Automated summary

This study aimed to investigate the variability for drought tolerance among potato cultivars. By conducting experiments over 11 years, the stability of drought tolerance of potato cultivars under different water regime conditions was examined. Data on the responses of 50 potato cultivars to drought stress were collected, and tuber yield and other parameters were analyzed. Through the evaluation of ensemble learning models, a classifier with 96.7% accuracy was developed to distinguish different tolerance groups.