Synergizing LED technology and hydropriming for intelligent modeling and mathematical expressions to optimize chickpea germination and growth indices

Abstract

The influence of hydropriming and Light Emitting Diodes (LED) on germination and growth indices, followed by optimizing and validation via artificial intelligence-based models was carried out in this research. White LEDs (W-LEDs) were more effective by yielding the most effective growth indices, such as mean germination time (MGT) (1.11 day), coefficient of variation of germination time (CV t ) (20.72%), mean germination rate (MR) (0.81 day-1), uncertainty (U) (0.40 bit), and synchronization (Z values) (0.79); the optimum MGT (1.09 day), CV t (15.97%), MR (0.77 day-1), U (0.32 bit), and Z (0.55) values were found after 2 h of hydropriming, which was responsible for all efficient growth indicators. W-LEDs with 1 h hydropriming proved to be the ideal LED and hydropriming combination. Results on growth indices for in vitro seedlings were completely different from those on germination indices, and the most desirable germination indices were linked to red LEDs (R-LEDs). Whereas 4 h hydropriming was most effective for the post-germination process. Pareto charts, normal plots, contour plots, and surface plots were created to optimize the input variables. Finally, the data were predicted using Arificial Neural Network (ANN) inspired multilayer perceptron (MLP) and machine learning-based random forest (RF) algorithms. For both models, plant height was correlated with maximum R 2 values. Whereas, all output variables had relatively low mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) scores, indicating that both models performed well. The results of this investigation disclosed a link between certain LEDs and hydropriming treatment for in vitro germination indices and plant growth.