2023 17th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology & Internet-Based Systems (SITIS)
2023 17th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology & Internet-Based Systems (SITIS) | 979-8-3503-7091-1/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/SITIS61268.2023.00079
Performance Evaluation of
Machine Learning Algorithms for
a Cluster-based Crop Recommendation System
Dalhatu Muhammed
Institut Supérieur d’Electronique de Paris (ISEP)
Paris, France
dalhatu.muhammed@ext.isep.fr
Maria Trocan
Institut Supérieur d’Electronique de Paris (ISEP)
Paris, France
maria.trocan@isep.fr
Abstract—A cluster-based crop recommendation system cate-
gorizes the crop candidates into several groups or classes (e.g.,
based on soil and environment parameters similarities). After
receiving a request from a farmer, it recommends the most
appropriate group of crops to the farmer. Proposing a group
of crops (i.e., more than one crop) can allow farmers to consider
their personal interests as well. In addition, the cluster-based crop
recommendation system can reduce the complexity and utilized
resources (e.g., compute resource). As the main contribution of
this paper, we evaluate the performance of different Machine
Learning (ML) algorithms to find the most appropriate one for
using in the cluster-based crop recommendation system.
Index Terms—Crop Recommendation, Machine Learning
(ML) Algorithms, Cluster-based and Performance Evaluation
I. I NTRODUCTION
S MART agriculture (SA) utilizes technology to increase
efficiency, productivity and sustainability in agriculture. It
proposes various solutions ranging from crop, soil, water and
disease management to smart harvesting [1].
Crop management, as one of the SA solutions, is a set
of agricultural practices performed to improve the growth,
development and yield of crops. It covers a vast range from
seedbed preparations, sowing of seeds and crop maintenance to
crop harvest, storage and marketing. The crop recommendation
system, as part of the crop management, takes several features
(e.g., weather, soil and crop) as input and suggests the most
appropriate crops to the farmers.
In our previous work [2], we proposed the concept of
a User-friendly AIoT-based Crop Recommendation system
(UACR). In this paper, we first present the concept of a cluster-
based crop recommendation system which is an improved
version of UACR.
The cluster-based crop recommendation system can recom-
mend a group of crops to a farmer. Therefore, it can give this
979-8-3503-7091-1/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/SITIS61268.2023.00079
Authorized licensed use limited to: Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. Downloaded on April 28,2024 at 11:00:52 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Ehsan Ahvar Shohreh Ahvar
Nokia Nokia
Massy, France Massy, France
ehsan.ahvar@nokia.com shohreh.ahvar@nokia.com
opportunity to the farmer to choose one of the crops of the
recommended group based on his/her interests.
In addition, the grouping of crops can reduce the complexity
and, therefore, can reduce the resource usage (e.g., compute
resource) of the recommendation system.
On the other hand, an appropriate Machine Learning (ML)
algorithm can play an important role in the performance of
a cluster-based crop recommendation system. To this end,
performance evaluation of different ML classification algo-
rithms to find the most appropriate one is necessary. The key
contributions of this paper are as follows:
• We present the concept of a cluster-based crop recom-
mendation system.
• We group the crops based on their soil and environment
parameters similarities.
• Using a dataset, we evaluate the performance of different
ML classification algorithms for the cluster-based crop
recommendation system.
• We find and propose the most appropriate ML classi-
fication algorithm for the cluster-based recommendation
system.
The remaining part of this paper is as follows: Section II
presents the related work. The cluster-based crop recommen-
dation system is introduced in Section III. In Section IV, we
evaluate the performance of different ML algorithms. Section
V concludes our work and discusses the future work.
II. R ELATED WORK
Crop recommendation systems, as part of crop management,
grabbed the attention of researchers over the last few decades
to increase food production and minimize global food short-
age. The studies in the literature suggested various crops for
farmers to grow on their farms utilizing different algorithms.
The well-known algorithms such as Naïve Bayes, Support
Vector Machine (SVM), Support Vector Classifier (SVC), De-
cision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Random Forest
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 (RF), Linear Regression (LR), Artificial Neural Networks
(ANN), and Multivariate Linear Regression (MLR) have been
evaluated in previous studies (i.e., [3], [4], [5], [6]).
In a research conducted by [7], Convolutional Neural Net-
works (CNNs) were used for soil analysis of the pictures
uploaded by farmers and, then, an RF algorithm was used
for selecting a crop to grow. However, the above-mentioned
work did not consider all important parameters related to soil
and weather.
Research conducted by [8], used pattern matching method
to select a suitable crop for a farmer, by considering user
location and season as inputs and suggesting the best crop for
farmers. In another research in [9], authors used a content-
based filtering technique to suggest crops to the farmer by
considering user location and season for cultivation as input.
However, the recommendation systems of [8] and [9] did not
consider soil pH and nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium
(NPK) for recommending the best crops to the farmers.
The crop recommendation introduced by [10], used the
clustering method of Density-Based Spatial Clustering of
Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) with a ball-tree algorithm
to recommend a crop to the farmers based on soil parameters
and seasonal soil variations. However, the system did not
consider climate conditions such as rainfall and humidity. In
addition, the clustering here was used to cluster the regions
based on their soil parameters and geolocation information.
In our paper, clustering is used for grouping the crops with
similar parameters for cultivation.
In research of [11], the authors trained ML algorithms for
crop recommendation and compared the performance of LR,
RF, DT and XGBoost and their results showed that RF scored
a higher accuracy. Similarly, in a research conducted by [12],
[13], SVM was used for suggesting a suitable crop to the
farmers. An ensemble classification crop recommendation was
proposed in [14], which used DT, SVM, RF, Naive Bayes
and Logistic Regression and showed that RF and Naive Bayes
scored a higher accuracy.
The authors in [15], used DT, KNN, RF, SVM, Naive
Bayes and Logistic Regression for recommending crops to
the farmers and compared their performance where XGBoost
and RF scored a higher accuracy and authors of [16] used LR
and Neural Networks which considered the cost of cultivation,
the model price of crops, the standard price of crops, the
nutrient contents, rainfall and temperature data. However,
the recommendation system did not consider humidity in
recommending the best crops to the farmers.
A crop recommendation system was proposed by [17],
where a large number of algorithms (i.e., Naive Bayes, Lo-
gistic Regression, SVM, DT, RF, KNN, LGBM, XGBoost,
Gradient Boosting, AdaBoost and Bagging Classifier) were
evaluated which showed that RF scored a higher accuracy.
The NPK for the soil was not considered by this work as an
input.
These above-mentioned related work proposed only one
crop to the farmer. However, our work recommends a group
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of crops giving the farmer the freedom to apply other local
parameters and interests.
III. C LUSTER - BASED C ROP R ECOMMENDATION S YSTEM
In our previous work [2], we proposed a User-friendly AIoT-
based Crop Recommendation system concept.
In UACR, the user interface enables a user to make a
recommendation request by sending a farm location data to
the recommendation system. Considering the farm location,
the system automatically obtains other required data and runs
its ML model to find the most appropriate crop. It finally sends
the recommended crop to the farmer.
This paper presents a cluster-based recommendation system.
The cluster-based recommendation system is an extended ver-
sion of UACR proposed in our previous work [2]. As shown in
figure 1, unlike our previous work that recommends only one
crop, the cluster-based recommendation system recommends
a group of crops to the farmers (i.e., usually between 2
or 3 crops). By grouping the crops and, therefore, reducing
the number of classes, the system complexity and required
resources (e.g., required computing resource) can be also
reduced. In addition, it can open hands of farmers to have a set
of candidates (i.e., the crops in the proposed group) and select
the most appropriate crop based on their interests. For the
grouping of crops, we use the K-means clustering algorithm
in this paper.
IV. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION
This section presents the performance evaluation of ML
algorithms for cluster-based crop recommendation. It includes
the preprocessing and analysis of the datasets, evaluation
tools, evaluated ML models, hyperparameter features, valida-
tion techniques and evaluation metrics. Finally, we present a
comparison of different ML models based on the accuracy
metric.
A. Dataset and Libraries
The initial dataset has 2200 data samples and 8 attributes. It
has been downloaded from the Kaggle website1 . The following
are the features of the dataset:
• Nitrogen (N) which is a nutrient content of the soil
• Phosphorous (P) which is a nutrient content of the soil
• Potassium (K) which is a nutrient content of the soil
• Temperature which is weather data of the environment
• Humidity which is weather data of the environment
• pH which is the soil pH level.
• Rainfall which is weather data of the environment
• Label which represents a crop type in the dataset.
We started with dataset characteristic analysis and prepro-
cessing by checking the attributes of the dataset, checking
the null and missing values, the duplicate values, outliers and
descriptive analysis of the dataset.
We then augmented the dataset size to 6000 and 12000 sam-
ples. Data augmentation is the process of increasing the size
1 https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/aksahaha/crop-recommendation/
 Fig. 1. The cluster-based crop recommendation system

of a dataset by creating new examples through transformations TABLE I

of existing data. This is often done to increase the diversity VALUES OBTAINED FOR HYPER - PARAMETERS
of data available for training the models. Here, we used one Models Parameter Value Best
of the common data augmentation techniques for csv datasets Score
which is the random noise method by adding random noise RF max-depth 15 0.9949
min-samples-leaf 2
to the numerical features of the dataset [18]. Therefore, we min-samples-split 10
finally had an initial version and two augmented versions of n-estimators 100
the dataset. KNN metric manhattan 0.9827
n-neighbors 5
B. Descriptive Analysis and Data Visualization Logistic C 0.1 0.9581
Regression
The descriptive analytics of the data was conducted before penalty l2
the model training to show how the dataset looks like and give DT max-depth 8 0.9864
min-samples-leaf 4
some insights for the best predictive models with the help min-samples-split 4
of statistical analysis of the dataset. The data visualization SVM C 100 0.9863
was carried out using a correlation matrix to visualize the gamma scale
kernel rbf
correlation coefficient of the dataset attributes as presented in XGBoost learning-rate 0.5 0.9896
Fig 2. This shows a significant correlation between P and K, max-depth 3
humidity and temperature, humidity and nitrogen and humidity n-estimators 100
Naive Bayes priors None 0.9863
and rainfall. Similarly, the diagonal data showed that there is var-smoothing 1e-09
a very significant correlation between those dataset features. Bagging bootstrap True 0.9942
max-features 0.5
C. Crops Clustering max-samples 1.0
n-estimators 50
We used one of the most popular clustering algorithm (i.e., GradientBoost learning-rate 0.1 0.9812
the K-means algorithm) for grouping the crops. K-means clus- max-depth 3
tering is an unsupervised ML algorithm used for partitioning n-estimators 50
LGBM learning-rate 0.1 0.9909
a dataset into K distinct, non-overlapping subsets or clusters max-depth 3
[19]. The initial dataset using in this paper consists of 22 crops. n-estimators 150
The clustering algorithm divided them to 7 clusters based on
the similarities to have 2 to 3 crops in every group.
efficient model for the cluster-based crop recommendation sys-
D. Models Comparison tem. In our evaluation, as we do not have temporal information
Scikit-learn library [20] and Python were used for evaluating on the dataset and we have no season variation within the
and comparing different ML models to find out the most dataset, we evaluated well-known algorithms that are used

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 Fig. 2. Dataset features correlation matrix

for non-temporal datasets. We consider RF, KNN, Logistic see that the worst results belong to Logistic Regression. In
Regression, DT, SVM, XGBoost, Naive Bayes, Bagging, Gra- general, increasing size of the dataset from 2000 to 6000 and
dientBoost and LGBM ML models. even 12000 could not make a noticeable effects on the results.
We used 70% of the initial dataset (2200 samples) for
training and hyperparameter tuning and 30% of the dataset V. C ONCLUSION
for testing. GridSearchCV method was utilized for the hyper- This paper first presented the concept of a cluster-based crop
parameter tuning. We also evaluated the performance of the recommendation system where the crops were grouped based
ML models. Table I shows the obtained hyperparameter values on their soil and environment parameters similarities. The
for the ML models. The best score represents the accuracy of cluster-based crop recommendation system received a farm
the ML models. information from a farmer as input and, then, recommended
a group of crops to the farmer. The benefits were 1) having
TABLE II
ACCURACY COMPARISON USING DATASETS WITH SIZES OF 2200, 6000 more than one option for farmers to consider their interests
AND 12000 as well, 2) reducing complexity and resource usage for the
recommendation system.
Models 2200 6000 12000
i=5-i=10 i=5-i=10 i=5-i=10 We then evaluated the performance of several well-known
RF 0.9941- 0.9946- 0.9945- ML algorithms to see which one is the best candidate to
0.9952 0.9952 0.9951 be used in the cluster-based crop recommendation system.
KNN 0.9793- 0.9791- 0.9791-
0.9798 0.9800 0.9800 The result showed that RF obtained the highest accuracy.
Logistic 0.9553- 0.9559- 0.9559- XGBoost, LGBM and GradientBoost were close to RF. The
Regression 0.9594 0.9586 0.9607 dataset utilized in this work was small. We saw that even
DT 0.9875- 0.9874- 0.9876-
0.9903 0.9907 0.9910 augmenting the dataset could not change the results noticeably.
SVM 0.9777- 0.9773- 0.9773- As a future work, the ML models under study can be compared
0.9789 0.9791 0.9791 considering a larger dataset.
XGBoost 0.9925- 0.9927- 0.9927-
0.9948 0.9950 0.9950
Naive Bayes 0.9887- 0.9845- 0.9845-
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