Artificial neural network and decision tree–based models for prediction and validation of in vitro organogenesis of two hydrophytes—Hemianthus callitrichoides and Riccia fluitans

The application of plant tissue culture protocols for aquatic plants has been widely adopted in recent years to produce cost-effective plants for aquarium industry. In vitro regeneration protocol for the two different hydrophytes Hemianthus callitrichoides (Cuba) and Riccia fluitans were optimized for appropriate basal medium, sucrose, agar, and plant growth regulator concentration. The MS No:3B and SH + MSVit basal medium yielded a maximum clump diameter of 5.53 cm for H. callitrichoides and 3.65 cm for R. fluitans. The application of 20 g/L sucrose was found appropriate for yielding larger clumps in both species. Solidification of the medium with 1 g/L agar was optimized for inducing larger clumps with rooting for both species. Provision of basal medium with any concentration of 6-benzylaminopurine (BAP) and α-naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA) was found detrimental for inducing larger clumps for both species. The largest clumps of H. callitrichoides (5.51 cm) and R. fluitans (4.59 cm) were obtained on basal medium without any plant growth regulators. The attained data was also predicted and validated by employing multilayer perceptron (MLP), random forest (RF), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithms. The performance of the models was tested with three different performance metrics, namely, coefficient of regression (R2), means square error (MSE), and mean absolute error (MAE). Results revealed that MLP and RF models performed better than the XGBoost model. The protocols developed in this study have shown promising outcomes and the findings can irrefutably assist to produce H. callitrichoides and R. fluitans on a large scale for the local aquarium industry.