Enhancing the effectiveness of fungicides by optimizing their combinations

In controlling biological diseases, it is often more potent to use a combination of agents than using individual ones. However, the number of possible combinations increases exponentially with the number of agents and their concentrations. It is prohibitive to search for effective agent combinations by trial and error as biological systems are complex and their responses to agents are often a slow process. This motivates to build a suitable model to describe the biological systems and help reduce the number of experiments. In this paper, we consider the use of fungicides to inhibit Bipolaris maydis and construct models that describe the responses to fungicide combinations. Three data-driven modeling methods, the polynomial regression, the artificial neural network and the support vector regression, are compared based on the experimental data of the inhibition rates of the southern corn leaf blight with different fungicide combinations. The analysis of the results demonstrates that the support vector regression is best suited to the construction of the response model in terms of achieving better prediction with fewer experiments.