Semi-supervised Soil Moisture Prediction through Graph Neural Networks

Recent improvement and availability of remote satellite and IoT data offers interesting and diverse applications of artificial intelligence in precision agriculture. Soil moisture is an important component of multiple agricultural and food supply chain practices. It measures the amount of water stored in various depth of soil. Existing data driven approaches for soil moisture prediction use conventional models which fail to capture the dynamic dependency of soil moisture values in near-by locations over time. In this work, we propose to convert the problem of soil moisture prediction as a semi-supervised learning on temporal graphs. We propose a dynamic graph neural network which can use the dependency of related locations over a region to predict soil moisture. However, unlike social or information networks, graph structure is not explicitly given for soil moisture prediction. Hence, we incorporate the problem of graph structure learning in the framework of dynamic GNN. Our algorithm, referred as DGLR, provides an end-to-end learning which can predict soil moisture over multiple locations in a region over time and also update the graph structure in between. Our solution achieves state-of-the-art results on real-world soil moisture datasets compared to existing machine learning approaches.