DIAFAN-TL: An instance weighting-based transfer learning algorithm with application to phenology forecasting

Abstract

The agricultural sector has been, and still is, the most important economic sector in many countries. Due to advances in technology, the amount and variety of available data have been increasing over the years. However, compared to other economic sectors, there is not always enough quality data for one particular domain (crops, plantations, plots) to obtain acceptable forecasting results with machine learning algorithms. In this context, transfer learning can help extract knowledge from different but related domains with enough data to transfer it to a target domain with scarce data. This process can overcome forecasting accuracy compared to training models uniquely with data from the target domain. In this work, a novel instance weighting-based transfer learning algorithm is proposed and applied to the phenology forecasting problem. A new metric named DIAFAN is proposed to weight samples from different source domains according to their relationship with the target domain, promoting the diversity of the information and avoiding inconsistent samples. Additionally, a set of validation schemes is specifically designed to ensure fair comparisons in terms of data volume with other benchmark transfer learning algorithms. The proposed algorithm, DIAFAN-TL, is tested with a proposed dataset of 16 plots of olive groves from different places, including information fusion from satellite images, meteorological stations and human field sampling of crop phenology. DIAFAN-TL achieves a remarkable improvement with respect to 15 other well-known transfer learning algorithms and three nontransfer learning scenarios. Finally, several performance analyses according to the different phenological states, prediction horizons and source domains are also performed.