An artificial intelligence-based stacking ensemble framework for smart irrigation pump control using IoT sensor data

Abstract

Efficient water management is essential for sustainable agricultural production, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions where water resources are limited. Machine-learning-based irrigation systems can support automated pump-operation decisions using environmental and soil-related sensor data. However, most previous studies have focused on individual machine-learning models, while the application of stacked ensembles to binary irrigation pump-status prediction remains relatively limited. This study proposes a stacking-based framework for predicting irrigation pump operation in an ON/OFF classification setting. The framework uses environmental and soil-related variables, including soil moisture, temperature, humidity, and a numerical time-related feature. Random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and multilayer perceptron models were trained as base learners, and their out-of-fold (OOF) predictions were combined using a logistic-regression meta-learner. The models were evaluated on a held-out test set using accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score. The individual models achieved accuracies ranging from 97.34% to 99.95%, with XGBoost providing the best individual performance. The proposed stacking ensemble achieved 99.97% accuracy, 99.94% precision, 100.00% recall, 99.94% specificity, and a 99.97% F1-score. Compared with XGBoost, the ensemble further refined predictive performance, improving accuracy by 0.02 percentage points and F1-score by 0.01 percentage points while achieving complete elimination of false negatives (100.00% recall). These results demonstrate the potential of stacked ensemble learning to improve binary pump-operation prediction and support data-driven irrigation management in water-limited environments.