Assessment of agricultural energy consumption of Turkey by MLR and Bayesian optimized SVR and GPR models

Agricultural productivity highly depends on the cost of energy required for cultivation. Thus prior knowledge of energy consumption is an important step for energy planning and policy development in agriculture. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the application potential of multiple linear regression (MLR) and machine learning tools such as support vector regression (SVR) and Gaussian process regression (GPR) to forecast the agricultural energy consumption of Turkey. In the development of the models, widespread indicators such as agricultural value-added, total arable land, gross domestic product share of agriculture, and population data were used as input parameters. Twenty-eight-year historical data from 1990 to 2017 were utilized for the training and testing stages of the models. A Bayesian optimization method was applied to improve the prediction capability of SVR and GPR models. The performance of the models was measured by various statistical tools. The results indicated that the Bayesian optimized GPR (BGPR) model with exponential kernel function showed a superior prediction capability over MLR and Bayesian optimized SVR model. The root mean square error, mean absolute deviation, mean absolute percentage error, and coefficient of determination (R²) values for the BGPR model were determined as 0.0022, 0.0005, 0.2041, and 0.9999 in the training phase and 0.0452, 0.0310, 7.7152, and 0.9677 in the testing phase, respectively. As a result, it can be concluded that the proposed BGPR model is an efficient technique and has the potential to predict agricultural energy consumption with high accuracy.