# Enhancing Strawberry Yield Forecasting with Backcasted IoT Sensor Data and Machine Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18451/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09363/) (2019)
- [TabTransformer: Tabular Data Modeling Using Contextual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06678/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Ensemble Learning under the Era of Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08387/) (2021)
- [A CNN-RNN Framework for Crop Yield Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09045/) (2019)
- [Improving the Accuracy of Global Forecasting Models using Time Series Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02663/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Data in Human Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09191/) (2022)
- [The Role of Cross-Silo Federated Learning in Facilitating Data Sharing in the Agri-Food Sector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07468/) (2021)
- [Forecasting Corn Yield with Machine Learning Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09055/) (2020)
- [Model Pruning Enables Localized and Efficient Federated Learning for Yield Forecasting and Data Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09876/) (2023)
- [Fully Homomorphically Encrypted Deep Learning as a Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12997/) (2021)
- [Premonition Net, A Multi-Timeline Transformer Network Architecture Towards Strawberry Tabletop Yield Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08177/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rapid global population growth underscores the need for digitally enabled agricultural systems that support sustainable food production and data-driven resource management for farmers and stakeholders. The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, capable of capturing real-time environmental (e.g., temperature, humidity) and operational (e.g., irrigation) parameters, is a crucial step toward enabling advanced applications such as AI-based yield forecasting. However, the effectiveness of such models is often constrained by limited data availability, particularly in dynamic farm environments where IoT observations must be accumulated over multiple growing seasons. In this study, we deployed IoT sensors in strawberry production polytunnels over two growing seasons to collect data on water usage, internal and external temperature and humidity, soil moisture, soil temperature, and photosynthetically active radiation. These observations were combined with manually recorded yield data spanning four seasons. To address gaps in IoT data for the two seasons without sensor coverage, we developed an AI-based backcasting approach that synthesizes missing sensor observations using historical weather data from a nearby station and existing polytunnel measurements. We then trained AI-based yield forecasting models using both real and synthetic datasets. In this retrospective evaluation, results show that incorporating synthetic data improved yield forecasting accuracy, with models trained on the combined dataset outperforming those using only real sensor, weather, and yield data.