A combined prediction approach based on wavelet transform for crop water requirement

Abstract The accurate prediction of crop water requirement is of great significance for the development of regional agriculture. Based on the wavelet transform, a combined prediction approach for crop water requirement is proposed. Firstly, the Mallat wavelet transform algorithm is used to decompose and reconstruct the crop water requirement series. The approximate and detail components of the original series can be obtained. The characteristics of approximate components and detail components are analyzed by Hurst index. Then, according to the different characteristics of the components, the particle swarm optimization algorithm optimized support vector machine is used to predict the approximate component, and the autoregressive moving average model is used to predict the detail components. Three-fold cross-validation is used to improve the generalization ability of the forecasting model. Finally, combined with the prediction value of each prediction model, the final prediction value of crop water requirement is obtained. The crop water requirement data from 1983 to 2018 in Liaoning Province of China are collected as the research object. The simulation results indicate that the proposed combined prediction approach has high prediction accuracy for crop water requirement. The comparison of performance indicators shows that the root mean square error of the proposed prediction approach reduced by 45.40% to 57.16%, mean absolute error reduced by 32.96% to 52.07%, mean absolute percentile error reduced by 33.02% to 52.37%, relative root mean square error reduced by 45.26% to 57.38%, square sum error reduced by 70.18% to 80.42%, and the Theil inequality coefficient reduced by 59.02% to 80.77%. R square increased by 16.46% to 54.77%, and the index of agreement increased by 3.82% to 23.37%. The results of Pearson's test and the DM test show that the association strength between the actual value and the prediction value of the crop water requirement is stronger. Moreover, the proposed prediction approach in this paper has higher reliability under the same confidence level. The effectiveness of the proposed prediction approach for crop water requirement is verified. The proposed prediction approach has great significance for the rational use of water resources, planning and management, promoting social and economic sustainable development.