Estimating fish weight growth in aquaponic farming through machine learning techniques

Due to the ever-growing population, rapid urbanization, unusual environmental change, and dwindling water supply, the food production from conventional farming techniques won’t be able to keep up with increasing food demand for long, leading to severe food scarcity. Aquaponics is emerging as a viable alternative to food cultivation techniques but lacks efficiency, hindering its adoption on a large-scale production basis. The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in smart aquaponic farming can further contribute to increasing the yield in aquaponics. In the study, both linear and non-linear regression algorithms such as linear regression, lasso regression, ridge regression, KNN regression, SVR, and decision tree regression were trained on aquaponic fish pond dataset, evaluated on the basis of multiple metrics like MAE, MSE, RMSE, and RMSLE, and a competitive analysis was done to determine the best algorithm for predicting the harvest weight of the fish in aquaponic ponds. The results showed that KNN regression and decision tree regression algorithms have lowest error and highest accuracy of 99.15% and 99.1% respectively, for predicting the harvest weight of the fish. The results obtained could be scaled up to commercial levels and used in regulating nutrient concentration and aquatic environmental conditions