Frost forecasting through machine learning algorithms

Agriculture continues to be one of the world’s main sources of income and provides great environmental, territorial and social value. However, frost is a recurring problem for farmers each year, representing a significant threat to agricultural production. In a matter of hours, temperatures below th...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Pérez Tárraga, Javier, Castillo Cara, Manuel, Arias Antúnez, Enrique, Dujovne, Diego
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
Repositorio:RUIdeRA. Repositorio Institucional de la UCLM
OAI Identifier:oai:ruidera.uclm.es:10578/44214
Acceso en línea:https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-025-01710-6
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12145-025-01710-6#citeas
https://hdl.handle.net/10578/44214
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Frost forecast
Frost methodology
Machine learning methods
Synthetic minority oversampling technique
Descripción
Sumario:Agriculture continues to be one of the world’s main sources of income and provides great environmental, territorial and social value. However, frost is a recurring problem for farmers each year, representing a significant threat to agricultural production. In a matter of hours, temperatures below the freezing point can result in the loss of nearly the entire crop from a producer. In this article, we have analyzed and compared the application of a set of machine learning algorithms to predict the occurrence of frost events in the next 24 hours. The prediction process covers several challenges, such as data capture, processing, extracting each relevant parameter and finally building different prediction models to compared their performance. Furthermore, we have employed the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) methodology to address the issue of imbalanced datasets, given the natural scarcity of frost events during the data sampling period. Our results show that among the machine learning algorithms we compared, the most efficient in terms of Recall score is K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), while using the Area Under Curve (AUC) criteria, the highest score belongs to the Extra Trees algorithm, with 0.9909. Moreover, by applying the SMOTE balancing process, the AUC score of our models increased 13%, while the Recall score increased from 55% to 82%.