Plant disease prediction using classification algorithms

This paper investigates the capability of six existing classification algorithms (Artificial Neural Network, Naïve Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree and Random Forest) in classifying and predicting diseases in soybean and mushroom datasets using datasets with numerical or categorical attributes. While many similar studies have been conducted on datasets of images to predict plant diseases, the main objective of this study is to suggest classification methods that can be used for disease classification and prediction in datasets that contain raw measurements instead of images. A fungus and a plant dataset, which had many differences, were chosen so that the findings in this paper could be applied to future research for disease prediction and classification in a variety of datasets which contain raw measurements. A key difference between the two datasets, other than one being a fungus and one being a plant, is that the mushroom dataset is balanced and only contained two classes while the soybean dataset is imbalanced and contained eighteen classes. All six algorithms performed well on the mushroom dataset, while the Artificial Neural Network and k-Nearest Neighbor algorithms performed best on the soybean dataset. The findings of this paper can be applied to future research on disease classification and prediction in a variety of dataset types such as fungi, plants, humans, and animals.