Abstract

Agricultural droughts are a prime concern for economies worldwide as they negatively impact the productivity of rain-fed crops, employment, and income per capita. In this study, Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) has been used to evaluate different drought indices for Rajasthan of India. In agricultural, hydrological, and meteorological applications such as irrigation scheduling, crop simulation, water budgeting, reservoir operations, and weather forecasting, the accurate estimation of the drought indices such as the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) plays an important role. Thus, the present study was conducted to examine the feasibility and effectiveness of the Random Subspace (RSS) model and its hybridization with the M5 Pruning tree (M5P), Random Forest (RF), and Random Tree (RT) to estimate the SPI at 3, 6, and 12 droughts during 2000–2019. Performances of RSS and hybridized algorithms were assessed and compared using performance indicators (i.e., MAE, RMSE, RAE, RRSE, and R²) and various graphical interpretations. Results indicated that the RSS-M5P provided the most accurate SPI prediction (MAE = 0.497, RMSE = 0.682, RAE = 81.88, RRSE = 87.22, and R² = 0.507 for SPI-3; MAE = 0.452, RMSE = 0.717, RAE = 69.76, RRSE = 85.24, and R² = 0.402 for SPI-6. And MAE = 0.294, RMSE = 0.377, RAE = 55.79, RRSE = 59.57, and R² = 0.783 for SPI-12) compare to RSS alone, RSS-RF, and RSS-RT models for study the drought situation in Jaisalmer Rajasthan. The M5P algorithms have improved the performance of the RSS structure.