Data-mining Techniques for Image-based Plant Phenotypic Traits Identification and Classification

Statistical data-mining (DM) and machine learning (ML) are promising tools to assist in the analysis of complex dataset. In recent decades, in the precision of agricultural development, plant phenomics study is crucial for high-throughput phenotyping of local crop cultivars. Therefore, integrated or a new analytical approach is needed to deal with these phenomics data. We proposed a statistical framework for the analysis of phenomics data by integrating DM and ML methods. The most popular supervised ML methods; Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine with linear (SVM-l) and radial basis (SVM-r) kernel are used for classification/prediction plant status (stress/non-stress) to validate our proposed approach. Several simulated and real plant phenotype datasets were analyzed. The results described the significant contribution of the features (selected by our proposed approach) throughout the analysis. In this study, we showed that the proposed approach removed phenotype data analysis complexity, reduced computational time of ML algorithms, and increased prediction accuracy.