Machine learning algorithms to assess the thermal behavior of a Moroccan agriculture greenhouse
A. Allouhi, Noureddine Choab, Abderrachid Hamrani, Said Saadeddine
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to assess the potential of machine learning algorithms in predicting the indoor air temperature in a greenhouse using the outdoor data. A dataset gathering the main weather data and the indoor air temperature of a greenhouse located in Agadir, Morocco was used for this purpose. Machine learning models including support vector machine based-regression, ensemble trees and Gaussian process regression are compared against multiple linear regression models. This comparison was carried out on the basis of a 5-fold cross validation framework and across unseen data. The results show that all predictive models are capable of describing the indoor air temperature of the greenhouse and perform well (R2 > 0.9), with only 10% fraction of the dataset as training data. The Gaussian process regression outperforms all models, with R2 = 0.94 in the 5-fold cross validation test. However, the computational time related to the training of Gaussian process regression model is slightly higher than other machine learning models.