The control of moldy risk during rice storage based on multivariate linear regression analysis and random forest algorithm

Clarifying the mechanism of fungi growth is of great significance for maintaining the quality during grain storage. Among the factors that affect the growth of fungi spores, the most important factors are temperature, moisture content and storage time. Therefore, through this study, a multivariate linear regression model among several important factors, such as the spore number and ambient temperature, rice moisture content and storage days, were developed based on the experimental data. In order to build a more accurate model, we introduce a random forest algorithm into the fungal spore prediction during grain storage. The established regression models can be used to predict the spore number under different ambient temperature, rice moisture content and storage days during the storage process. For the random forest model, it could control the predicted value to be of the same order of magnitude as the actual value for 99% of the original data, which have a high accuracy to predict the spore number during the storage process. Furthermore, we plot the prediction surface graph to help practitioners to control the storage environment within the conditions in the low risk region.