Prediction of Frost Events Using Machine Learning and IoT Sensing Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) in agriculture applications have evolved to solve several relevant problems from producers. Here, we describe a component of an IoT-enabled frost prediction system. We follow current approaches for prediction that use machine learning algorithms trained by past readings of temperature and humidity sensors to predict future temperatures. However, contrary to current approaches, we assume that the surrounding thermodynamical conditions are informative for prediction. For that, a model was developed for each location, including in its training information of sensor readings of all other locations, autonomously selecting the most relevant ones (algorithm dependent). We evaluated our approach by training regression and classification models using several machine learning algorithms, many already proposed in the literature for the frost prediction problem, over data from five meteorological stations spread along the Mendoza Province of Argentina. Given the scarcity of frost events, data was augmented using the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). The experimental results show that selecting the most relevant neighbors and training the models with SMOTE reduces the prediction errors of both regression predictors for all five locations, increases the performance of Random Forest classification predictors for four locations while keeping it unchanged for the remaining one, and produces inconclusive results for logistic regression predictor. These results demonstrate the main claim of these works: that thermodynamic information of neighboring locations can be informative for improving both regression and classification predictions, but also are good enough to suggest that the present approach is a valid and useful resource for decision makers and producers.