Multisource Maximum Predictor Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Corn Yield Prediction

Recently, with the advent of satellite missions and artificial intelligence techniques, supervised machine learning (ML) methods have been more and more used for analyzing remote sensing (RS) observation data for crop yield prediction. However, due to the domain shift between heterogeneous regions, supervised ML models tend to have poor spatial transferability. As a result, models trained with labeled data from one spatial region (i.e., source domain) often lose their validity when directly applied to another region (i.e., target domain). To address this issue, we proposed a multisource maximum predictor discrepancy (MMPD) neural network that is an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approach for corn yield prediction at the county level. The novelties of this study include that: 1) we proposed to maximize the discrepancy between two source-specific yield predictors and align source and target domains by considering crop yield response in the target domain and 2) we adopted the strategy of multisource UDA to avoid negative interference between labeled samples from different sources. Case studies in the U.S. corn belt and Argentina demonstrated that the proposed MMPD model had effectively reduced domain shifts and outperformed several other state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) and UDA methods.