Machine learning-assisted analysis for agronomic dataset of 49 Balangu (Lallemantia iberica L.) ecotypes from different regions of Iran

The Balangu (Lallemantia iberica) species have a high gastronomical impact in the Middle East and Balkan region. It is widely used in the local food industry, such as confectionery, edible oil, and protein food. In this study, 49 ecotypes were collected from different regions of Iran. 37 agronomic traits were measured during the growing season and at harvest time. To find the correlation between the grain yield per unit area, grain yield per single plant (GYSP), oil percent (OP), and protein percent (PP) with other measured traits, which these were utilized as the labels of different machine learning (ML) procedures including Linear Regression (LR), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Random Forest Regression (RFR), and Gradient Boosting Decision Tree Regression (GBDTR). It was observed that there is a linear relationship between the measured agronomic traits and the considered labels. So, the LR, RFR, and GBDTR models showed the lowest mean absolute error, mean square error, and root mean square error than SVR models and good prediction ability of the test data. Although, the RFR and GBDTR have naturally lower bias than other methods in this study, but the GBDTR scheme is preferred because of the over-fitting shortcoming of the RFR technique. The GBDTR method showed better results rather than the other ML regression methods according to the RMSE 3.302, 0.040, 0.028, and 0.060 for GYUA, GYSP, OP, and PP, respectively.