TY - CONF ID - russ2010ida T1 - Spatial Variable Importance Assessment for Yield Prediction in Precision Agriculture A1 - Ruß, Georg A1 - Brenning, Alexander ED - R. Cohen, Paul ED - M. Adams, Niall ED - Berthold, Michael R. TI - Proceedings of IDA2010 T3 - LNCS Y1 - 2010 VL - 6065 SP - 184 EP - 195 PB - Springer AD - Heidelberg SN - 978-3-642-13061-8 UR - http://www.springerlink.com/content/p63pn0561u18r34w/ M2 - doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-13062-5_18 N2 - Precision Agriculture applies state-of-the-art GPS technology in connection with site-specific, sensor-based crop management. It can also be described as a data-driven approach to agriculture, which is strongly connected with a number of data mining problems. One of those is also an inherently important task in agriculture: yield prediction. Given a yield prediction model, which of the predictor variables are the important ones? In the past, a number of approaches have been proposed towards this problem. For yield prediction, a broad variety of regression models for non-spatial data can be adapted for spatial data using a novel spatial cross-validation technique. Since this procedure is at the core of variable importance assessment, it will be briefly introduced here. Given this spatial yield prediction model, a novel approach towards assessing a variable’s importance will be presented. It essentially consists of picking each of the predictor variables, one at a time, permutating its values in the test set and observing the deviation of the model’s RMSE. This article uses two real-world data sets from precision agriculture and evaluates the above procedure. ER -