Data-Driven Prediction of Climate Variables in Agricultural Cities of India With Hybrid GA-TCN-LSTM Model

Abstract

Accurate prediction of climate variables is important in reducing the effects of natural disasters and taking preventive measures for agriculture and food security, energy sector, public health, and water resources management. For agricultural production, it is essential for producers to determine strategies for their agricultural activities and to increase agricultural productivity. Issues such as determining planting and harvest times, determining pesticides to be used against agricultural pests, selecting products to be planted, irrigation, and sustainable agriculture are directly related to climate variables. In this study, a GA-TCN-LSTM hybrid prediction model was created to determine climate variables such as relative humidity, temperature, wind speed, and dew point in Bhopal, Indore, Kanpur, Ludhiana, and Patna, which are among the prominent cities of India in terms of agricultural production. The hyper-parameters of the developed model using the temporal convolutional networks (TCN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) were optimized with the genetic algorithm (GA), and the GA-TCN-LSTM hybrid model was created. GA-TCN-LSTM was extensively compared with the base TCN-LSTM, convolutional neural network (CNN), LSTM, TCN, and CNN-LSTM. The compared models were tested using approximately 15 years of hourly, up-to-date, and real-time data of the cities. Experiments showed that GA-TCN-LSTM outperformed the compared models and had above 0.9 R-Squared (R²) for the majority of cities and climate variables.