Comparison of five Boosting-based models for estimating daily reference evapotranspiration with limited meteorological variables

Accurate ET(0) estimation is of great significance in effective agricultural water management and realizing future intelligent irrigation. This study compares the performance of five Boosting-based models, including Adaptive Boosting(ADA), Gradient Boosting Decision Tree(GBDT), Extreme Gradient Boosting(XGB), Light Gradient Boosting Decision Machine(LGB) and Gradient boosting with categorical features support(CAT), for estimating daily ET(0) across 10 stations in the eastern monsoon zone of China. Six different input combinations and 10-fold cross validation method were considered for fully evaluating model accuracy and stability under the condition of limited meteorological variables input. Meanwhile, path analysis was used to analyze the effect of meteorological variables on daily ET(0) and their contribution to the estimation results. The results indicated that CAT models could achieve the highest accuracy (with global average RMSE of 0.5667 mm d(-1), MAE of 4199 mm d(-1)and Adj_R(2) of 0.8514) and best stability regardless of input combination and stations. Among the inputted meteorological variables, solar radiation(Rs) offers the largest contribution (with average value of 0.7703) to the R(2) value of the estimation results and its direct effect on ET(0) increases (ranging 0.8654 to 0.9090) as the station’s latitude goes down, while maximum temperature (T(max)) showes the contrary trend (ranging from 0.8598 to 0.5268). These results could help to optimize and simplify the variables contained in input combinations. The comparison between models based on the number of the day in a year (J) and extraterrestrial radiation (Ra) manifested that both J and Ra could improve the modeling accuracy and the improvement increased with the station’s latitudes. However, models with J could achieve better accuracy than those with Ra. In conclusion, CAT models can be most recommended for estimating ET(0) and input variable J can be promoted to improve model performance with limited meteorological variables in the eastern monsoon zone of China.