Pertanika Journal of Science & Technology
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Pertanika ยท Universiti Putra Malaysia Press

Pertanika Journal of Science & Technology

Official journal of Universiti Putra Malaysia for scholarly work across science, engineering and related technologies.

e-ISSN 2231-8526 ISSN 0128-7680
Pre-press article

JaNarX: Smart Soil Moisture Prediction using Jackal Optimiser Enabled Machine Learning Model in IoT Coupled Agricultural Applications

Seema Jitendra Patil and B. Ankayarkanni

https://doi.org/10.47836/pjst.34.2.06
KeywordsInternet of things, Jackal APIs optimisation, machine learning, precision agriculture, soil moisture
Article content

Abstract

Soil moisture can be used to provide predictive information important for precision farming, irrigation management, and pollution monitoring. Nonetheless, existing approaches often struggle to handle non-linear temporal relationships, environmental uncertainties, and poor real-time integration of sensor data, thereby degrading prediction performance. To overcome these problems, in this article, we introduce JaNarX, a soil moisture prediction framework (SMPF) based on IoT and the NARX model, optimised with the Jackal Apis Optimisation (JAO) algorithm. The approach utilises time-series radar satellite variables, meteorological terms, and continuous in situ sensor data to better capture dynamic changes of soil moisture. The Wazihub Soil Moisture Dataset (WSMD), which is the aggregation of multi-sensor environmental data measured in in-field conditions from real agricultural fields in Senegal, was used for training and validation. JAO was used to speed up convergence and tune NARX hyperparameters for solving the local minima problem,and increase the generalisation performance of the model. Experimental results in MAE, MSE, and RMSE evaluations had MAE = 1.53, MSE = 2.89, and RMSE = 1.70, which outperformed the state-of-the-art base-models such as SVM, LSTM, GLM XGBR, and traditional NARX network. The simulation results confirm that the proposed IOT-based, JAO-optimised NARX structure can achieve more accurate prediction than the traditional method and has good stability and computational efficiency. This paper presents a scalable, high-accuracy model for the prediction of soil moisture, suitable to enable real-time planning decisions for precision irrigation and sustainable water management in agriculture.