Hiba Najjar’s research while affiliated with Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz and other places

Crop yield forecasting plays a significant role in addressing growing concerns about food security and guiding decision-making for policymakers and farmers. When deep learning is employed, understanding the learning and decision-making processes of the models, as well as their interaction with the input data, is crucial for establishing trust in the models and gaining insight into their reliability. In this study, we focus on the task of crop yield prediction, specifically for soybean, wheat, and rapeseed crops in Argentina, Uruguay, and Germany. Our goal is to develop and explain predictive models for these crops, using a large dataset of satellite images, additional data modalities, and crop yield maps. We employ a long short-term memory network and investigate the impact of using different temporal samplings of the satellite data and the benefit of adding more relevant modalities. For model explainability, we utilize feature attribution methods to quantify input feature contributions, identify critical growth stages, analyze yield variability at the field level, and explain less accurate predictions. The modeling results show an improvement when adding more modalities or using all available instances of satellite data. The explainability results reveal distinct feature importance patterns for each crop and region. We further found that the most influential growth stages on the prediction are dependent on the temporal sampling of the input data. We demonstrated how these critical growth stages, which hold significant agronomic value, closely align with the existing literature in agronomy and crop development biology.

In recent years, black-box machine learning approaches have become a dominant modeling paradigm for knowledge extraction in remote sensing. Despite the potential benefits of uncovering the inner workings of these models with explainable AI, a comprehensive overview summarizing the used explainable AI methods and their objectives, findings, and challenges in remote sensing applications is still missing. In this paper, we address these issues by performing a systematic review to identify the key trends of how explainable AI is used in remote sensing and shed light on novel explainable AI approaches and emerging directions that tackle specific remote sensing challenges. We also reveal the common patterns of explanation interpretation, discuss the extracted scientific insights in remote sensing, and reflect on the approaches used for explainable AI methods evaluation. As such, our review provides a complete summary of the state-of-the-art of explainable AI in remote sensing. Further, we give a detailed outlook on the challenges and promising research directions, representing a basis for novel methodological development and a useful starting point for new researchers in the field.