Extracting Knowledge from Big Data for Sustainability: A Comparison of Machine Learning Techniques

At present, due to the unavailability of natural resources, society should take the maximum advantage of data, information, and knowledge to achieve sustainability goals. In today’s world condition, the existence of humans is not possible without the essential proliferation of plants. In the photosynthesis procedure, plants use solar energy to convert into chemical energy. This process is responsible for all life on earth, and the main controlling factor for proper plant growth is soil since it holds water, air, and all essential nutrients of plant nourishment. Though, due to overexposure, soil gets despoiled, so fertilizer is an essential component to hold the soil quality. In that regard, soil analysis is a suitable method to determine soil quality. Soil analysis examines the soil in laboratories and generates reports of unorganized and insignificant data. In this study, different big data analysis machine learning methods are used to extracting knowledge from data to find out fertilizer recommendation classes on behalf of present soil nutrition composition. For this experiment, soil analysis reports are collected from the Tata soil and water testing center. In this paper, Mahoot library is used for analysis of stochastic gradient descent (SGD), artificial neural network (ANN) performance on Hadoop environment. For better performance evaluation, we also used single machine experiments for random forest (RF), K-nearest neighbors K-NN, regression tree (RT), support vector machine (SVM) using polynomial function, SVM using radial basis function (RBF) methods. Detailed experimental analysis was carried out using overall accuracy, AUC–ROC (receiver operating characteristics (ROC), and area under the ROC curve (AUC)) curve, mean absolute prediction error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and coefficient of determination (R 2 ) validation measurements on soil reports dataset. The results provide a comparison of solution classes and conclude that the SGD outperforms other approaches. Finally, the proposed results support to select the solution or recommend a class which suggests suitable fertilizer to crops for maximum production.