FAYETTEVILLE — Igor Fernandes, a master's degree student in crop, soil and environmental sciences in University of Arkansas’ Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences, recently placed second in an international crop prediction contest conducted by the Genomes to Fields Initiative.
In initiative also known as G2F collected data on more than 180,000 corn field plots, including 2,500 hybrids and 162 unique environments. Competitors developed prediction models to predict maize yield based on genetic and environmental data from trials, datasets and other publicly available information. From Nov. 15 to Dec. 15, contestants had access to training data, and they had to submit their predictions by Jan. 15.
The Genotype by Environment contest was open to teams and individuals, and Fernandes developed his model individually. He is now working with his adviser, Sam Fernandes, assistant professor of agricultural statistics and quantitative genetics, to improve his prediction model. Fernandes is with the Center for Agricultural Data Analytics and is a researcher with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. His research ties into work with the departments of crop, soil and environmental sciences and horticulture.
A team from Corteva Agriscience won the contest and a $4,000 prize with a Mean Root Mean Square Error score of 2.328863. Igor Fernandes was second among 33 entries with a score of 2.345147. For this contest and this RMSE metric, lower scores are better. Models with a lower RSME mean the predicted maize yield is more similar to the actual yield when compared to another model with a larger RMSE.