Application of modified Deep Belief Network in Forecasting Cotton Diseases and Insect Pests

Objective] The occurrence and development of cotton diseases and insect pests are mainly related to environmental information. Because this environmental information is various, complex and unstable, the study on the prediction methods of cotton diseases and insect pests is a certain challenge. This study aims to establish a forecasting model for the timely and accurate prediction of cotton diseases and insect pests. Method] A forecasting model of cotton diseases and insect pests is proposed based on environmental information and a modified Deep Belief Network (DBN) that is constructed by a three-layer restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) and a supervised back-propagation (BP) network. In the method, the RBM is used to transform the original environmental information vectors into a new feature space related to the diseases and pests; the BP network is trained to classify and forecast the features generated by the last RBM layer and two rules of dynamic learning and comparison and dispersion are adopted to accelerate the training process of RBM. The proposed model was validated on a dataset of cotton bollworm, aphids, spider, cotton Verticillium wilt, and Fusarium wilt in a recent six-year period. Result] Compared with the traditional prediction models of cotton diseases and insect pests, the proposed model can deeply explore the extensive correlation between the occurrence of cotton diseases and pests and environmental information. The results show that the proposed model has a higher accuracy compared with the classical predictive models, and the average forecasting accuracy is above 83%. Conclusion] The proposed method is an effective crop disease and pest forecasting method that can provide a technical support for preventing cotton disease and insect pests.