Sowing Success: How Machine Learning Helps Farmers Select the Best Crops
Measuring essential soil metrics such as nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium levels, and pH value is an important aspect of assessing soil condition. However, it can be an expensive and time-consuming process, which can cause farmers to prioritize which metrics to measure based on their budget constraints.
Farmers have various options when it comes to deciding which crop to plant each season. Their primary objective is to maximize the yield of their crops, taking into account different factors. One crucial factor that affects crop growth is the condition of the soil in the field, which can be assessed by measuring basic elements such as nitrogen and potassium levels. Each crop has an ideal soil condition that ensures optimal growth and maximum yield.
A farmer reached out to you as a machine learning expert for assistance in selecting the best crop for his field. They've provided you with a dataset called soil_measures.csv, which contains:
"N": Nitrogen content ratio in the soil"P": Phosphorous content ratio in the soil"K": Potassium content ratio in the soil"pH"value of the soil"crop": categorical values that contain various crops (target variable).
Each row in this dataset represents various measures of the soil in a particular field. Based on these measurements, the crop specified in the "crop" column is the optimal choice for that field.
In this project, you will build multi-class classification models to predict the type of "crop" and identify the single most importance feature for predictive performance.
# All required libraries are imported here for you.
import pandas as pd
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn import metrics
# Load the dataset
crops = pd.read_csv("soil_measures.csv")Performing Exploratory Data Analysis:
The data has been loaded into a pandas dataframe. The following steps have been performed on the dataset:
- checking for null values
- no null values are present for any of the features in the dataset
- Checking for crop types
- to check if crop is a binary or multilabel feature
# Checking for null values:
print(crops.isna().sum().sort_values())# Checking if crop is a multilabel or binary feature
crops["crop"].unique()I have continued to split the into two sets - training set and test set
# Splitting the data into training set and test set
X = crops.drop("crop", axis = 1).values
y = crops["crop"].values
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size = 0.3, random_state = 42)In the next couple of steps, I have run the Logistic Regression model on every feature value to predict which feature value is best suited to predict the crop type.
results = {}
for i, feature in enumerate(["N", "P", "K", "ph"]):
logreg = LogisticRegression(multi_class="multinomial")
logreg.fit(X_train[:, i].reshape(-1, 1), y_train)
y_pred = logreg.predict(X_test[:, i].reshape(-1, 1))
feature_performance = metrics.f1_score(y_test, y_pred, average='weighted')
results.update({feature : feature_performance})
print(f"F1-score for {feature}: {feature_performance}")print(results)- From the f1 score of each of the features, we can see that potassium is the most suitable feature to determine which crop can be planted.
- This is stored in the variable "best_predictive_feature"
best_predictive_feature = {'K': 0.23467465114240763}
print("Best Predictive Feature: ", best_predictive_feature)