Predicting biomass and grain protein content using Bayesian methods

This paper deals with the problem of predicting biomass and grain protein content using improved particle filtering (IPF) based on minimizing the Kullback–Leibler divergence. The performances of IPF are compared with those of the conventional particle filtering (PF) in two
comparative studies. In the first one, we apply IPF and PF at a simple dynamic crop model with the aim to predict a single state variable, namely the winter wheat biomass, and to estimate
several model parameters. In the second study, the proposed IPF and the PF are applied to a complex crop model (AZODYN) to predict a winter-wheat quality criterion, namely the grain protein content. The results of both comparative studies reveal that the IPF method provides a better estimation accuracy than the PF method. The benefit of the IPF method lies in its ability to provide accuracy related advantages over the PF method since, unlike the PF which depends on the choice of the sampling distribution used to estimate the posterior distribution, the IPF yields an optimum choice of this sampling distribution, which also utilizes the observed data. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of estimation accuracy, root mean square error, mean absolute error and execution times.