INFLUENCE OF GROWTH PARAMETERS ON THE CROP YIELD PERFORMANCE OF HYDROPONIC SPINACH (SPINACIA OLERACEA L.) USING CORRELATION AND REGRESSION MODELS

Different growth parameters highly influence plant growth dynamics of the hydroponic system. Several predictive models can be applied to understand the plant growth dynamics in a hydroponic system. The spinach crop's plant growth cabinet had been designed to measure pH, EC, water temperature, air temperature, and humidity in a floating raft system. The target variables, the number of leaves, and length of a plate (in cm), measured day-wise, were considered in predicting the crop yield. Three correlation models were considered to analyse the association between multivariate input parameters with target variables. The results show that the Electrical Conductivity (EC) of the nutrient solution has a strong positive correlation. And to determine the crop yield, several Machine leaning based regressor models (Random Forest, Gradient Boost, K-Nearest Neighbors, Bayesian Ridge) were implemented. The models' performance was evaluated and compared based on accuracy score and RMSE. The results showed better prediction with the Random Forest regressor model with accuracy greater than 98%. Hence, with this study, the yield of indoor hydroponic plants could be improved by controlling pH and EC which has significant effect.