Filtering methods for predicting and modelling wheat yield in the context of climate change

Abstract

In this paper, an Improved Particle Filtering (IPF) based on minimizing Kullback-Leibler divergence will be proposed for biomass prediction of a wheat crop model in the context of climate change including heat and drought stresses.
In a first stage, the performances of the proposed technique will be compared with those of the extended Kalman filter (EKF), unscented Kalman filter (UKF), Particle filter (PF). In a second stage, the state estimation techniques EKF, UKF, PF and IPF will be used for updating prediction of the model in order to predict winter wheat biomass, in specific field conditions, during several contrasted weather conditions. In a third stage, the effects of practical challenges on the performances of the state estimation algorithms will be assessed. Such practical challenges include the effect of measurement noise on the estimation performances and the measurement frequency of state variables.
The first results show that the UKF provides a higher accuracy than the EKF due to the limited ability of EKF to accurately estimate the mean and covariance matrix of the estimated states through lineralization of the nonlinear process model. The results also show that the IPF provides a significant improvement over PF because, unlike the PF which depends on the choice of sampling distribution used to estimate the posterior distribution, the IPF yields an optimum choice of the sampling distribution, which also accounts for the observed data. For all techniques, the practical challenges affect the estimation accuracy as well as the convergence of the estimated states and parameters. However, the IPF can still provide both convergence as well as accuracy over other estimation methods. These advantages are precious in presence of high climate stresses.