Jacob D Washburn

Predicting phenotypes accurately from genomic, environment and management factors is key to accelerating the development of novel cultivars with desirable traits. Inclusion of management and environmental factors enables in silico studies to predict the effect of specific management interventions or future climates. Despite the value such models would confer, much work remains to improve the accuracy of phenotypic predictions. Rather than advocate for a single specific modelling strategy, here we demonstrate within large multi-environment and multi-genotype maize trials that combining predictions from disparate models using simple ensemble approaches most often results in better accuracy than using any one of the models on their own. We investigated various ensemble combinations of different model types, model numbers and model weighting schemes to determine the accuracy of each. We find that ensembling generally improves performance even when combining only two models. The number and type of models included alter accuracy with improvements diminishing as the number of models included increases. Using a genetic algorithm to optimize ensemble composition reveals that, when weighted by the inverse of each model’s expected error, a combination of best linear unbiased predictor, linear fixed effects, deep learning, random forest and support vector regression models performed best on this dataset.