Yield-Graph: Multi-stage Growth-aware Maize Yield Prediction via Graph Neural Networks

Abstract Accurate yield prediction before maize harvest is crucial for advancing agricultural management and ensuring food security. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on phenotypes from a single growth stage, this study models multiple traits across different developmental stages, all targeting final yield, thereby uncovering their dynamic and cumulative contributions. We introduce Yield-Graph, an innovative framework that integrates multi-stage phenotypic data for yield prediction. The method employs a bipartite graph structure to impute missing trait values at each stage and leverages a hypergraph attention mechanism to capture high-order sample relationships. Comprehensive benchmark experiments demonstrate that Yield-Graph consistently outperforms traditional machine learning and graph-based models in both trait completion and yield prediction. Moreover, the framework exhibits strong robustness across growth stages, high adaptability to regional variations, and effective generalization across datasets. These findings highlight the potential of graph-enhanced multi-stage modeling for early-stage yield prediction, offering a scalable solution for precision agriculture and intelligent crop management.