The production of agricultural products and the high yield in these products are of critical importance for the continuation of human life. In recent years, machine learning and deep learning technologies have been widely used in determining agricultural productivity. The purpose of this study was to estimate the yield of apple fruit by using a novel deep learning-based hybrid method. First, by using images belonging to the golden and royal gala apple varieties, a classification was made with the help of a convolutional neural network (CNN) that was designed for the study. Then, using classical machine learning algorithms and bagging and boosting algorithms, a hybrid application was performed by classifying the images whose feature extractions were done with the designed CNN. The results of the study, presented on 4 separate datasets (Datasets A, B, C, and D), were evaluated based on accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, and Cohen kappa scores. Considering the accuracy results for Datasets B, C, and D, it was determined that the hybrid model that gave the best result was the CNN-SVM model. For Dataset A, the CNN-SVM and CNN-Gradient Boosting hybrid models gave the best and same accuracy. Dataset C was determined as the most appropriate dataset in terms of the more balanced distribution of train, test, and validation size in the datasets, the results of the proposed hybrid CNN model, and the evaluation of the results of the model. For Dataset C, it was found that the accuracy of the hybrid model was 99.70%. Precision, recall, f-measure, and Cohen kappa scores were 99%. The results of the study revealed that the hybrid models showed effective results in determining the productivity of apple fruit through images belonging to the golden and royal gala varieties.INDEX TERMS Apple yield prediction, deep learning, ensemble methods, machine learning, smart farm.

Electrical load forecasting (ELF) is gaining importance especially due to the severe impact of climate change on electrical energy usage and dynamically evolving smart grid technologies in the last decades. In this regard, medium-term load forecasting, a crucial need for power system planning (generation optimization and outages plan) and operation control, has become prominent in particular. Machine learning and deep learning-based techniques are currently trending approaches in electrical load estimation due to their capability to model complex non-linearity, feature abstraction and high accuracy, especially in the smart power systems environment. In this study, several load forecasting models based on machine learning methods which comprise linear regression (LR), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), gradient boosting, adaBoost, and deep learning techniques such as recurrent neural network (RNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) are studied for medium-term electrical load demand forecasting at an aggregated level. Performance metric results of these analyzes are presented in detail. State-of-the-art feature selection models are examined on the dataset and their effects on these forecasting methods are evaluated. Numerical results show that forecasting performance can be significantly improved. These results are validated by the results of other studies on the subject and found to be superior.