Prediction of productivity of mustard plant at maturity using harmony search

The production of a plant can be measured by various parameters like shoot length, number of leaves, root length, number of roots etc. During the growth of a plant, new leaves may appear and some leaves may fall. As a result, it is very difficult to predict the growth of the plant based on the leaf numbers. It is also difficult to measure the plant growth on the basis of root numbers as it grows underground. So, it is very convenient to measure the plant growth with respect to shoot length. In this paper, an effort has been made to predict the shoot length of a mustard plant by harmony search. The average error has been calculated based on the actual shoot length and predicted shoot length by harmony search. The result obtained in this paper has been compared with other soft computing and statistical methods which have been applied to the same problem. It has been observed that harmony search has given the minimum error compared to that of the others. The least square method has been applied on the predicted shoot length to find the shoot length at maturity. Finally, the pod yield has been predicted based on the shoot length at maturity.