Soil water content forecasting by ANN and SVM hybrid architecture

Soil water content prediction is essential to the development of advanced agriculture information systems. Because soil water content series are inherently noise and non-stationary, it is difficult to get an accurate forecasting result. Considering the problems, in this paper, a novel hybrid learning architecture is proposed according to divide-and-conquer principle, the forecasting accuracy is improved. This novel hierarchical architecture is composed of ANN (Kohonen neural network) and SVM (support vector machine). The Kohonen network is used as a classifier, which partitions the whole input space into several distinct feature regions. Then, the best SVM predictor combined with an appropriate kernel function can be achieved for correspondence regions. The experimental results based on the hybrid model exhibit good agreement with actual soil water content measurements and outperform ANN and SVM single-stage models.